Almost toothless

When I picked up Shelby from her mother's today, I was greeted by a child that had one less tooth up top, and almost no front teeth at all left on the top row.

We had a birthday party to attend, so the plan was to hit the nearby Wal-Mart, pick up a gift (we were just invited Thursday, and the kids went to their mom's before any shopping could be done), and then head to the party back on our side of town. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out operation at Wal-Mart, but that didn't happen thanks to the craziest barcode/scanner/computer system incident I've ever experienced at any store, much less Wal-Mart.

There was a sizeable stack of the item we picked-up in the toy section with one of those "rollback" labels on it, clearly identifying the price. But when we got to the check-out lane, the item wouldn't ring up. Even when the (very patient) clerk manually punched-in the number. Her response? "Sorry, we can't sell this to you, it's not in the system." I couldn't believe it. So what system printed the "rollback" label? How can they just refuse to sell something to someone with cash in hand?

The clerk got a manager who fiddled more with the scanner before going to the toy section to check the numbers and get another box. Same result. Same reaction. "Sorry, we can't sell this to you, it's not in the system." I explained that we spent fifteen minutes looking for that gift, and another almost ten minutes fussing around at the check-out line, and that we had thirty minutes to be on the opposite side of town with a gift in hand. So that manager went and got another manager, who approved a manual override, allowing me to finally purchase the otherwise unpurchasable item. Sheesh.

Fortunately, even with all our trouble, we still made it to the party right on time. It was a skate party, so I took my blades in, though the kids didn't want to tkae theirs in, preferring rental skates for some crazy reason. But they had fun. Darby had to be made to leave the skate floor for cake and gifts, otherwise she was out there pretty much the whole three hours of the party. Shelby was out there quite a bit, too, but I had a hard time keeping her away from the wall. She had regressed a little since the last time she went skating. I skated on and off, mostly trying to help Shelby when I did skate.

Afterwards the girls went to Saturday mass with my step-mother, while I got a haircut.