So we’re home, and all in one piece–oh, except for Wade, who not ten minutes ago broke a tooth eating a date. Seriously! We were in the kitchen, having a nice chat with Charlie about his lunch (which consisted of a peanut butter-and-honey sandwich, a bowl of blueberries, a carrot, and a banana) and about what each of us likes and doesn’t like to eat (Mommy and Daddy like dates, but Charlie doesn’t!) and Wade bit into the date and the pit was still inside and ta da! broken tooth!

‘I guess that’s why they have that warning on the package, about how there might be pits inside,’ he said, staring at his tooth. Hooray! Now let’s all hope that our dentist is just on his lunch break and not out of the country for the holidays.

Broken teeth aside, our trip home was entirely uneventful. The boys watched videos for EVERY SINGLE MOMENT of the drive, if you can believe that. Usually, we insist on a TV-free window in the middle of the day, right after we stop in Amarillo for lunch; it’s the car version of Enforced Rest Time. But yesterday when we turned the DVD player off, the boys started playing See If You Can Grab My Hand Before I Smack You In The Head, which is a tremendously fun game until SOMEONE GETS SMACKED IN THE HEAD. The third time I heard ‘OW! YOU HIT ME! THAT REALLY HURT!’ (because you know I wasn’t about to turn around and actually SEE what was going on), I said, ‘Hey, who wants to watch MORE Bob the Builder?’ And peace returned to our Honda.

The most surreal part of the day was actually on our way out of Albuquerque. We stopped at the Whole Foods Market for pumpkin spice muffins and some of their fabulous crack-laced coffee, and while we were waiting for Charlie to finish eating already and he was veeery s l o w l y and carefully putting each individual crumb of muffin in his mouth and chewing it 100 times, Wade was staring intently out the window at the parking lot. ‘What are you looking at?’ I asked, expecting him to say, ‘Boob job.’

‘I’m just watching the craziness that’s unfolding out here,’ he said. I glanced out, expecting a squad of police cars, at the least (one morning my parents stopped at Whole Foods for a New York Times and were greeted by a full contingent of APD officers searching for a suspect) but all I saw was a very old man with a very scruffy looking Yorkshire terrrier. I figured the craziness was probably boob related and returned to encouraging Charlie to eat up! so we can go!

When we came outside, though, I saw what Wade had been watching: the little old man with the Yorkie was carefully unloading his parrots from the car and tethering them to a shopping cart, apparently so they could all have a little walk in the Whole Foods parking lot. He had three or four very noisy parrots attached to the cart (by little leashes on their ankles) and there was at least one more parrot still in a cage in the car. The ENTIRE back seat of his car–a tired-looking sedan–was filled with bird cages. Wade looked at me and said, ‘This is the craziness.’ Yes, that would indeed be the word for it.

So the parrots are squawking, the dog is yapping, and my kids are starting to dance around nervously. Charlie looks at the parrots and says, ‘Birdies! Don’t eat me!’ and Henry says, ‘He has a DOG!’ Meanwhile, the little man is trying to get the last parrot out of his car through the door that is next to our car and I can feel Wade trying to see if he has bumped our car with his door. We wait for the little man to see us, but he is intent on his bird; finally, as the boys are about to start screaming, Wade says, ‘Excuse me, could we get into our car?’

‘Of course, of course!’ the little man says pleasantly. ‘Take your time!’ The boys are really worked up now, so we stuff them pell-mell into our already overstuffed back seat and tell them to buckle their seat belts, right now! As we are pulling out, Charlie looks back at the spectacle of the birds on the shopping cart and says, ‘What is that man DOING?’

When I told my mother about the little man and his birds, she said, ‘I’ve seen him! I nearly had a wreck in the WalMart parking lot one day because I was watching him and not looking where I was going!’ Then she said, ‘Do you think he brings his own shoping cart, or was it one that belonged to Whole Foods?’

‘Oh, I’m sure it was one from the store,’ I tell her. ‘How would he get a shopping cart over there? His whole car was full of bird cages!’

‘I don’t think I’ll be using their carts any more,’ she says.

And that was the craziness for yesterday.