Bless Your Heart

Thursday nights are usually ballet nights in our household.  I typically come straight home from work and meet Kevin and Kate at our house.  We usually have about 5 minutes to switch Kate from Kevin’s car to mine, and then head directly to Kate’s ballet class, which starts at 5:30.  Well today, Kevin and I were pulling into the driveway at the same time, and when I walked over to his truck to get Kate out of the backseat, Kevin motioned for me to be quiet.  I looked in and Kate was snoozing away.  This is so not typical of her at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.  Apparently, she did not take a nap at school today, and Diane couldn’t get her to take a nap after she got out of school either, so by 5:30 she was exhausted.  We decided to forgo dance today, and let her get a nap in.  I carried her into the house, dance outfit, ballet shoes, and all… and she slept until 7 o’clock when I decided to wake her up.

We ate dinner and then ran to Target to pick up a few things.  In hindsight, the nap and Target trip may not have been the best idea, but whatever. C’est la vie.  Before we get into the story, let me preface this  by saying that here in the south, you hear the phrase “bless her heart” pretty often, and when it’s used, it’s not usually a good thing.  Here are urban dictionary’s definitions of the phrase:

1. This is a term used by the people of the southern United States particularly near the Gulf of Mexico to express to someone that they are an idiot without saying such harsh words. 

2. “You are an idiot but I like you and care about you so I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

So back to the Target trip: Kate does not like to ride in the shopping cart anymore.  She doesn’t like to be in the seat, and she doesn’t like to be in the big part.  However, she can’t be trusted to walk alongside me in the store, so I usually force her to sit in the big part of the shopping cart, while I try to cram all of the items that I’m wanting to buy into the small front seat area.  Well, inevitably, we ran out of room in the front seat for the stuff we were buying, so a few things ended up in the bigger part of the shopping cart with Kate.  All was fine until we got to the checkout line.

As we started unloading groceries and miscellaneous items into the conveyor belt area, Kate turned to me and said “I’m all wet”.  I looked down at her and sure enough, she was all wet.  She had opened a bottle of Rid-x (septic tank cleaner) and spilled it all over herself, and on the stuff in our grocery cart. 

I immediately picked Kate up, put her on the ground and Kevin and I started cleaning her up.  The cashier handed us her big bottle of hand sanitizer and some paper towels and we got everything off of her.  We told Kate where to stand and said “don’t move” as we turned our attention to cleaning up the floor, the shopping cart, and the items in our cart.  Well apparently the cashier had put the opened bottle right on the other side of the conveyor belt area where we had told Kate to stand, because the next thing we know, we turn around and Kate had the bottle in her hands AGAIN and was proceeding to spill even more on the floor and get it all over herself again!

Bless. Her. Heart.

That’s all I can say.  And apparently, the cashier thought the same thing.  I sent Kevin outside with Kate to get her out of the way, while I finished cleaning things up and paying for our items.  As I was running my card and putting things into our still-wet shopping cart, the cashier kept laughing and saying over and over and over: “Well just bless their heart.”  Not really sure if she was talking about me and Kevin, or Kate, but I think the phrase pretty much fit us all tonight.