Miss America and Mall Meltdowns

I am watching the Miss America Pageant. Why? I don't know. I think there are much better things a woman can do with her time/life than trying to prove herself to be the most perfect Miss in America this year. But inside me resides a little girl who is a sucker for an evening gown, would like to wear a sparkly crown all the time and is fascinated by extremely tall, long-legged women. Their legs, geez, their legs are taller than I am.

But I am struck this year, after watching the swimsuit competition, that each woman has the same skin color - burnt orange. Of course there are two or three women of color in the finalists, and they are not painted burnt orange, but when you line them all up and pan the camera in a sweeping motion as they are want to do, you see a wash of legs and rock hard abs of all the same color. They all blend in. So I get it. White skin, pale skin, does not work in a bikini. But really, orange is better? Put down the spray tan, ladies. Everyone in the real world thinks you look stupid.

Also, big hoop earrings, bracelet size, seem to be the style. Not something I will be following. But that is ok. Earrings the size of my head somehow don't seem desirable to me.


We went shopping today. Jackson got a haircut from the oldest, slowest hair stylist we have encountered. She was really nice, but didn't seem to understand that you have 10 minutes before Jackson can't sit still any more. She took forever. She snipped and combed, snipped and combed, and just took her sweet time till Jackson was ready to crawl off the chair and run away. He did well under the circumstances. He tried to sit still. But it just took too long. Like 35 minutes. And in the end the cut was kind of clunky in the back and not exactly straight in the front. It is hard to cut straight and neatly when the kid is wiggly. But if you take 35 minuted, he is gonna get wiggly.

We looked around the outlet mall for shoes for David. He is a meticulous shoe shopper, needs to try on several shoes in several stores. Has to know all his options before choosing. Which is fine, unless you have a three year old with you. We did well at the outlet mall. He behaved pretty well. But David didn't find the shoes he wanted and we decided to head to the other mall to look more.

We should have quit while we were ahead. It was 4:00, Jackson had eaten too much junk food and very little lunch and had not had a nap. We were not the smartest parents in the world for going to the mall under the circumstances. We had a feeling it was not a good idea.

And we were right. We barely got into the mall before Jackson was throwing a fit about not wanting us to stop at the bathrooms. Then when we finished in the bathrooms and were headed into the mall proper, he decided we needed to go back to the bathrooms because he needed a drink of water from the water fountains. We were outside the cookie company so tried to get him a drink there, but he threw a fit and nothing would do but the water fountain several stores away and up the escalators from where we were. At that point David scooped up the crying, yelling boy and said, we are going home.

And we should have left right then. But the threat of leaving calmed the boy and we stupidly decided to stick it out and actually try to look at some shoes. We traipsed through a couple of stores looking, but Jackson poked around, stalled and became unreasonable as only a tired 3 year old can do. The last straw came when we walked past an establishment we didn't expect. Lakeline mall has one of those places you can take your kid to jump on a dozen different inflatable moon walk/jumpy things. And this place has a glass wall to the mall. Jackson saw the place and melted down big-time cause we were not going in.

The place was crowded, cost $10 each to get it and we were just unable to cope at that point and decided to cut and run. So we carried a screaming kid from one end of the mall all the way to the other end where we were parked. David and I started giggling a little bit here and there on our long walk of shame, since we both knew we deserved the meltdown for going to the mall even though we knew better.

And we still need to get David some shoes. Somehow I can't imagine we will be ready to brave the mall again any time soon.

Is is a right of passage? Do we all have to make the screaming child walk of shame at some point as parents of small children?