As I walked out of church today looking at my one year old
strut through the parking lot in his Mickey-Mouse high tops while holding a
box of raisins and his sloth stuffed animal, I realized that my experience with
walks of shame hit an all-time low today and there is not a damn thing I can do
to change it…
I took my 6 year old and 1 year old to church this
morning. Taking two children out
anywhere is stressful enough, but taking them to church (a quiet, soothing
environment) is stressful on a whole different level. When we arrived, my mom was waiting for us by
the front door and we went and found a seat right by one of my mom’s friends
that we have known for years. (And as it
turns out, Ryder is obsessed with my mom’s friend, Shelly.) So we sit. And the
priest says, “Let’s all start by watching this video.” The first thought in my head was “sh*t”. It’s
hard enough to get my kids to sit through mass, but adding a video before the
hour long mass is almost making my parenting mission impossible. I can’t even tell you what was on the video because
I was too busy picking up raisins off of the floor and putting a necklace on a
sloth (don’t ask- I don’t have a good answer).
Any who, we made it through the video. But the singing- the singing killed me. Ryder decided that singing was fun. So fun,
actually, that he needed to yell, hallelujah at the top of his lungs after the music
stopped because he has found a love of his echoing voice during periods of
silence. You know who doesn’t love his
echoing voice during quiet periods? The
person who is supposed to be keeping him quiet during this time.
I finally got Ryder quiet for 30 seconds until he remembered
that Shelly was sitting down the pew from us.
He then decided to repeatedly ask “Where Shelly?” Over and over and over
until the entire congregation was wondering where Shelly was.
At some point Ryder dropped a handful of raisins on the seat
in front of us while everyone was standing and I had to quickly pick them up
before the parishioner in front of us plopped down onto a pile of wet, sticky, already sucked on raisins. After those raisins were consumed, we had ran
through all of our activities and snacks and I was sweating from embarrassment. I grabbed our coats and hightailed it out of
there. I got into my car and looked at
the clock. We had lasted 36 minutes in
church. Quite possibly the longest 36 minutes of my life. As I turned my head to back out of our parking spot, I made eye contact with Ryder who was raising his hands in the air and yelled, "Hallelujah" as if praising the fact that we were out of church.
