Carrie took her first-ever trip to a megawarehouse store yesterday. It was overwhelming, to say the least. We entered near the massive television display, wound our way quickly over to where umbrellas were on sale (two for $20), and found ourselves on the fifty-pounds-of-cheese-puffs section before we even knew what happened. She got a little frantic at all the noise and sights, so I soothed her like any good cop-out mom: with candy. We walked the aisles until we found three rows of bulk candy, and even that got to be too much for her.
“Let’s take one quick look at all the candy, then we’ll sit over there and figure out which candy we want,” I suggested. We did a near-run through all three aisles, sat at one of the benches by the restrooms, and talked it over. She decided she wanted the barrel of gourmet jelly beans we had seen two aisles into the fray. We got in, nabbed the barrel, and were out of there like a Navy SEAL team. I had to remind her a couple of times not to drop the giant jar since the jelly beans would roll in every direction, so she clutched the torso-sized container to her chest with both arms.
We made it home, peeled back the seal under the lid, and I scooped out a small little cup of jelly beans. She ran off with her carefully gotten gains and began to munch.
Then screamed.
“Oh no! I cannot eat it! It is cinnamon! It is too spicy!” She held out the chewed-and-gooed wad of spit out red jelly bean, which I took dutifully discarded like a piece of biohazard.
“Oh no! This one is root beer!”
“Oh no! This one is fruit!” (I heard that one several times.)
It got to the point that she held up every jelly bean and asked me what it was going to taste like. I finally put the jar in front of her so she could use the reference chart on the back. When it was over, she had actually eaten about four jelly beans. Later today, after a thorough hand washing, I’m going to let her amuse herself by sorting all of the jelly beans into edible and non-edible piles.
My next blog post will be about how to lose the weight after eating a warehouse-sized jar of offensive jelly beans that your child won’t taste.
