The Mother Road is Paved in Good Intentions

It was a spontaneous click, a little "just to let you know I was thinking about you" purchase I made last week.

I never intended for it to go so horribly wrong.

Nemo and his brother needed turtleneck shirts to wear under Halloween costumes. While at the virtual check stand, I saw some cute little underwear with dinosaurs on them that I thought the Maxosaurus would get a kick out of, so I tossed a pair in my virtual cart. And what with bundled shipping and my moral obligation to keep the economy rolling because obviously neither the free market nor our government can handle this mess alone, I grabbed a few other shirts for holiday gifts and voila!, my internet shopping was done and never a tear was shed.

Ahhh, so much easier than actual shopping. No strapping balls of butter in and out of car seats, no tug of war with fragile arm sockets and slippery hands in a parking lot of racing SUVs, no chasing of toddlers through open spaces and cranky crowds. The right size, the right color, and right to my door. Ahhh, so much easier.

I should know better.

While exalting in all the glory of today's sun and mud and tractor Tonkas, the boys were delighted to have their ears perked to the sound of a truck rumbling down our quiet road. The truck of brown goodness slowed at our driveway and the jumping began!

"It's for us! It's for us! We got a PACKAGE!!!"

Faster than you could ask what could Brown do for two getsited little boys with a truck! in their driveway! that delivers packages from places like Bubbi! And Santa! And toys! And TOYS! and Remote Control Dinosaurs!, I found myself simultaneously working on a signature, repelling the knee nibblers, and attempting to manage dinosaur-sized expectations. I told the boys that this was part of Sam's Halloween costume (since Max's size was on back order), a little something for Max, and the other items would be gifts for our cousins.

Never, ever did I utter these words: Remote or control.

I might have mentioned dinosaur.

The package got opened, the color for Nemo was a little off but certainly workable, and the size of the cousin gifts seemed within range.

The dinosaur underwear...not so much.

Did you hear the shrieks? At about 12:45 this afternoon? Yeah, that was what will forever be known as the "The UPS truck brought a shirt for my brother and all I got was this lousy pair of dinosaur underwear" Storm of 2008.

It was pathetic, it was loud and inappropriate, and it was funny as hell.

Once the crying slowed down and the breath began a regular pattern of inhale, I learned that there had been very high hopes for a remote control dinosaur. Tyrannosaurus Rex would be best, of course, but Stegasaurus or Triceratops would be fine, too.

Apparently Brown did not deliver. And neither did Mama.

Later, once the emotions had been thoroughly exhausted and discussed, we rode off to preschool.

"Mom, it's a good thing those guys are long necks on my new underwear", Max offered chirpilly.

"What's that?" I asked without the benefit of context or cohesive train of thought.

"I said, it's good that those dinosaurs on my underwear are longnecks because that means that they are plant eaters. I wouldn't want meat eaters down there where I couldn't see them."

Meat eating underwear: a very bad thing.