The Ice Cream Moment

Alexis has approximately -235235089 ounces of patience for my need to stop "just once" on the way home from things. I say just once, it ends up being ten times, none of the stops are fun, and basically she thinks adulting is stupid.

She's right, of course.

But while she has no patience for me stopping for milk on the way home from a movie, she also thinks it's perfectly acceptable to ask me to run to the store for milk at 6:30 am on a Saturday. WHICH IT IS NOT. AT ALL. NOPE. I don't do anything at early o'clock on a Saturday.

So last week when one of those milk stops became critical, Alexis whined. And whined. And whined. I didn't much care, so I stopped anyway and drug her out of the car. There was much complaining.

And then it occurred to her that she could use the moment to her advantage. Ice cream!

She dashed through the store to pick out some ice cream, which is all it took for it to be okay that I had to dart through the store for a coupe of essentials. Twenty minutes later, we were back in the car and headed home. Another twenty minutes after that, we pulled into our driveway. I reminded Alexis to grab the ice cream and that we could grab all of the other things we had picked up the next morning.

Guess what happened!

Of course Alexis grabbed everything except the ice cream. It sat in the car all night and was discovered the next day, well after it had melted into a pile of gross.

Alexis was sad. At first she tried to turn her sad to mad by blaming me, but then I reminded her that my exact words were, "Grab the ice cream, please." It's hard to blame someone for something when they definitely told you to do it.

And then I laughed. Because COME ON. All the kid cared about in life was that ice cream, but she managed to forget it. It was a funny mistake, and I told Alexis as much.

Since then, we've adopted the phrase "ice cream moment" as our way of describing moments when either one of us do something completely dumb. It's really the most perfect way of admitting you did something that makes no sense, except that strangers have no idea what we're talking about. So, uh, to the Target cashier who thought we were insane earlier tonight? We are, but I swear it all made sense.

You just have to know about the ice cream moment.