I'm not a fan of WALM-ART. I go there only when I need to. Unfortunately the need to go there has been twice in the last four days. Needless to say, I have had my fill and am WAY over my WALM-ART quota for the month. Maybe for the year.
I stopped in (if by "stopped in" you mean I dragged both children and my huge uncomfortable belly into the store after spending 20 minutes circling the parking lot for a space that would not cause me to walk my huge belly farther than a 3 mile distance...why the hell can't they have just ONE of those "Expectant Mother Parking" spots when they have 2000+ handicap spots??) to pick up a booster seat for my car. I've been breaking the law and driving around with LittleJuJu in the backseat secured only by a seat belt for too long now. His booster is in Mr. JuJu's car and I'll be damned if I can ever remember to grab it and put it back into my own. So what the hell, I buy another one and we both win.
So we go in, I find ONE booster seat in stock, throw it in the cart and make my journey up to the checkout to pay and hopefully get out before the kids start their kid crap:
Can I have this? I NEED this! Oh my god, Billy has this, can I get this? YOU ARE NO FAIR. I'm hungry, can I get a candy bar? WHY? You are so mean to me. I never get anything anymore. I bet BabyJuJu can have something, she gets whatever she wants. OHHH, can I have THAT? WHAT? No? Fine. I am not eating my dinner. I mean it. I don't care. Can we just GO? I hate this store.
YEAH ME TOO.
So after we get home and do homework, eat dinner, play with some toys, watch some TV, I notice that LittleJuJu is playing with something. It looks like a credit card. So I go over, thinking that it is one of the gazillion fake promotional cards that we get in the mail and I give to him to play with. I grab it to check and to my HORROR, I see that it is a WALM-ART gift card. I scan my brain trying to place it. Hoping and wishing that there was maybe one tucked away in the desk or in a drawer that I had forgotten about and never used. I couldn't come up with a logical reason that my son would have this on his person. I asked where it had come from.
"I found it."
"You FOUND it?"
"Yes."
"Where did you find it?"
"I dunno."
Ok, so there is my answer. He stole it. My son stole this card from a store. Great. Peachy. I am raising a felon. Not even a SNEAKY felon. He was laying on the couch just PLAYING with it, right in front of me! Like, LA-TI-DA....Lalala, looky what I've got! Wee, so much fun playing with this card, it feels so smooth across my lips...look how I can bend it just so and shoot it across the room...Lalala.
My little shoplifter. Who thinks that because it was not a toy or candy, that no one would mind that he took it...and it was laying on the floor. I mean really, MOTHER. The FLOOR.
So on top of the two visits in four days, I had to make the pilgrimage BACK into retail hell and find an employee who seemed to know where she was (no easy feat) and force my son to admit to what he had done and apologize. Do you know what that bitch said to my son as he handed her the card?
She said, "Oh it's OK, Honey. Thank you!".
After I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I grabbed his hand and rather loudly told him that it was indeed NOT OKAY and headed out the door.
I'm just...speechless. Really.
Has your child ever stolen anything? How have you dealt with it? I'm thinking I would have loved if the security guard at least would have come over and scared the boy some. Nothing! She thanked him and said it was okay! I'm speechless.