How We Scarred The Children For Life and Triggered Their Gambling Addiction

The third full day of our vacation was rainy. Not the whole day, just until around 4 in the afternoon.

We took advantage of the rain and headed into town for a quick jaunt to Target (I love Target!), a movie, and a late lunch in a restaurant.

Target is my second home and I was pleased to learn that the small town near our cabin had a Target. I needed necessities like fuzzy posters with markers and a second pair of jeans. For reasons that totally escape me at the moment, I only possess one pair of jeans. Fortunately they are awesome, but still. One pair.

I decided that it was most grody to wear the one pair of jeans fishing on the boat where they could quite possibly come in contact with fish guts or worm juice and then wear them later that night to the community pot luck/fish fry.

To quote Ernest "Ehhhwww!"

My point? A second pair of jeans was needed and I figured Target was my best bet. Usually Target has a lovely assortment of clothing, but for some reason, this Target had only one style of denim in my size: the Mom jean.

Sigh.

Can I have a moment of silence for all the cotton ball thing-ys that died to make Mom jeans?

My options were limited, so I sucked it up and bought some hot looking Mom jeans at Target. And I use the term "hot looking" very, very loosely here. You probably knew that already.

*Side note: A few hours later it occurred to me that, on this vacation, I was the geek who schlepped the big camera with multiple lenses everywhere. At first that thought bothered me, but then I remembered that I was wearing Mom jeans from Target. It's hard to maintain any level of coolness when you are wearing Mom jeans from Target. Suddenly, I feel better about the camera schlepping.

Since I was saving my new Mom denim to wear fishing on the boat, I wore my non-Moms to the movie.

My husband and I picked the movie and we chose one that we thought would be enjoyable for kids and parents. Theoretically. Sadly, we didn't realize that the experience of seeing this movie would scar the children for life.

The premise of the movie was that some kids in 1979 (I loved 1979!) used Super 8 mm film to shoot a zombie movie. While shooting the movie, they witness a train crash and then strange things start happening around their town.

Fun movie, right? I thought it would kinda be like E.T. (I loved E.T.!)

We had no idea that it was an intense sci-fi thriller containing a full out war between humans and an alien with parts of a homemade zombie movie thrown in.

To say it scared the children would be a mild understatement. One child had a blanket over her head. The other one had her eyes screwed as tightly shut as humanly possible while keeping her hands over her teddy bear's eyes to spare him from seeing anything horrifying.

My husband and I loved the movie. We thought it was great.

The kids … not so much.

Later that night after a brief fishing expedition in the boat, we further cemented our status as Parents of the Year by teaching the kids how to play poker.

Five card draw.

With pretzel M&Ms as "money" (I love pretzel M&Ms!).

The kids were surprisingly good poker players.

I was equal parts proud and concerned.

The good news: no one had bad dreams because of the movie we saw. Or my new Mom jeans.

The bad news: I lost at poker. Big time. But that's probably because I kept eating my money.

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