Every time I walked through the boor with an arm full of groceries, the race started. I put up the items I had purchased as fast as I could before my two little girls would scatter the entire grocery store all over my floor, leaving sacks, cans and boxes of food everywhere. At least I didn’t have to worry as much about the eggs and bread. They at least had learned that the paper bag of fragile groceries was off limits until I was done. Putting everything up became an obstacle course as I tried not to trip on the stampeding kids rushing from bag to bag, maneuvering my way around cans so as to not slip and break my neck, all the while trying to keep an eye on the kids to make sure they didn’t find the need to try and stick one of the plastic bags over their head as they ran around. I was lucky if I got anything in the right place at all as I navigated my way across so many distractions. However, the ruckus was always worth it as I watched with pleasure the excitement they found in something that was such a mundane task for me. I don’t really know what it was about the paper bag that they cherished, but to them it was the golden egg of the entire experience. They would wait with eager anticipation for me to empty out the coveted paper bag and then proceed to beg me to place them in it. They looked like little groundhogs, peeping their heads in and out of their dark hole, grinning at the world they saw. Yes, there were usually fights about who got to play in the bag first, but the threat of losing their bag was enough to usually humble at least one of them. It usually only took ten or fifteen minutes until the bag was beyond use for their active imagination, but it became a prized fifteen minutes of fun for all of us every week.
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