Way Back When-esday - Everyone Makes Mistakes...

...the Thanksgiving Eve episode.

Way back when, when Darren and Sarah were wee one-year-olds, I made a classic maternal mistake---one I've remembered each and every year on this day since.

Excerpted from Twinspiration: Real-Life Advice from Pregnancy through the First Year and Beyond, the self-exposing chapter entitled "Everyone Makes Mistakes," enjoy...and feel better. We all make mistakes...some bigger than others.

Dateline: November 2002 

Twins’ age: 14 months 

Thanksgiving grocery shopping.  Using the “push-double-stroller-with-one-hand-in-front, while-pulling-grocery-cart-behind-with-other-hand method”, we complete our Thanksgiving grocery shopping on Thanksgiving Eve afternoon.  The bag-man at Food Lion, in every effort to be helpful on this busy shopping day, offers to bring my cart to the curb once I have loaded the babies in the car.  After his continued insistence, I go along.  Pulling up to the front of the store, the bag-man is no where to be found.  Not wanting to honk, I turned off the car to wait.  Finally, realizing he has no doubt forgotten, I decide to pull directly in front of the automatic door, crack the back car windows for the babies, and run in the door quickly to signal the man for our cart.  Better lock the car doors.  Don’t want the gifts for which I am most thankful to be at risk even for a few seconds.  As I shut the car door, I see my keys.  In the ignition.  Ugh.  Signaled for my groceries, and for a call to the police, alerting them to my “two infants locked in the car” faux pas.  The crew at Food Lion was fantastic, and far more panicky than I was.  Needless to say, the babies were fine.  We made goofy faces at them from the outside (as I usually do), so nothing seemed out of the ordinary to them.  Another employee owned a similar model car, and offered to “break in” mine as he often did into his.  After being told the wait was upwards of 45 minutes for the auto locksmith, this young, gallant  Food Lion employee had us in our car within 5 minutes.  Knowing the time, anguish, and money he had saved us by his feat, I was desperately trying to shove cash into the young man’s hands.  His response?  “Buy something nice for the babies.  They’re cute.”  My faith in Generation X was thoroughly restored.  However, upon recounting this tale to hubby, it took a while for his faith in Mommy to be restored. When this car died a few months later, we purchased a used Volvo station wagon. In addition to the incredible safety rating, an undeniable selling point was that you cannot lock yourself out of the car.