My Beloved

I LOVE TARGET.

Anyone who knows me, knows that. It is the best place ever. So imagine my surprise when I experienced such a rough time with it this week!

On Sunday I loaded Andrew, Rylee and Devynn into the car and drove to Target. I then unloaded them, got Devynn into a cart, and started to shop. Suddenly, I had this crazy thought that I didn't have my money with me. I started looking through my wallet and purse.

Nothing.

So we hurried out to the car to search.

Nothing.

Since I didn't have my money, I had to load the kids back into the car and drive home, all the while panicking over the fact that I couldn't find the $100 Ryan had left for me. Fortunately, it turned out that I had left the money on the counter so it was nice and safe. But by this time, it was about time to feed the kids lunch and put them down for naps. Needless to say, we never made it back to Target that day.

So yesterday morning, I needed to go to the bank, cash my check and go to Target (since I hadn't been able to get back there since my Sunday fiasco). I loaded Rylee and Devynn into the truck and started driving. Next thing I knew, I was getting out of the car at Target...I had driven right past the bank without stopping!! So I got back in, turned around and drove to the bank. Once I was done at the bank (which took longer to unload the girls than actually to cash my check)(and since I had Ryan's truck, it is a total pain in the butt to load/unload the kids!), we loaded back up and drove to Target.

Yay!

I had finally made it to Target to shop! We began with a "potty" break since Devynn is working on potty training, and then started shopping. We were just about done and were on the far end of the store when Devynn announced that she needed to go potty again. Since you can't tell a potty-training two year old to wait a couple minutes, we quickly made our way all the way across the store. She did her business, we completed our shopping and made our way to the registers. Strangely when we were checking out, the lights all dimmed. Weird, but we were done shopping and headed home.

So then yesterday afternoon the kids decided that they wanted to spend their Target gift cards that they had all gotten for Easter. Since I knew I wasn't going to have any time to take them over the weekend, I decided to take them right then. We loaded up once again (but first I checked to make sure they all had their gift cards with them!) and headed to Target. It was my third time pulling into the parking lot that day! We unloaded all my monkeys and started shopping.

Everything was going good, and we were almost done when suddenly the power went out. It was COMPLETELY black inside there!! I couldn't even see Devynn sitting in the cart right in front of me. Everyone in the whole store went quiet, and all the carts stopped moving. Then you started hearing all the Moms (me included) saying "It's ok" and "I'm right here, just stay right here" and "Reach out your hand" to their little ones. Thankfully it didn't take too long for the back-up generators to kick on so we could see again. We didn't have all of the lights, but enough to see and finish getting the last few things we needed.

Then we made our way to the registers to pay. The lines were very long because the registers still had to come back online. The manager was apologizing to everyone and passing out coupons for the inconvenience (but the stupid woman passed right over me...TWICE!) (Don't worry, my lovely cashier got them for me!) Finally all of the lights came back on and the registers were up. They had every cashier up to the front to check guests out and all was going very smoothly and quickly. Since the kids were all paying separately, it took us a little longer but they were still happy and behaving.

We were just about done with our very last transaction when the registers crashed again!

We were so close!!

It took a little while for the registers to come back up, and we were quickly finished.

YAY!! I've never been so happy to leave Target!! What an adventure we had!!

I'm not sure what was happening with me and Target this week, but I'm hoping that the universe re-aligns and all turns right again between us! :)

And in case you were wondering:
It turns out that the power was out all over. 270,000 residents were without power, some for up to an hour. Last I heard, they still didn't know what had caused the outage. I just hope the next time it happens I'm not at Target...I love that place, but it's kinda creepy without the power on! :)