Shopping? Or heat stroke? – A Wee Blether

The chores and dirty jobs in our house—and executive authority over them—are divvied into a predictable pattern not uncommon in suburban America.

I enjoy complete and total authority over taking out the garbage, keeping the lawn from consuming our driveway and occasionally changing the air conditioning filter.

My wife, meanwhile, has executive command of keeping the people who reside in our house alive and fed, getting us all to and from work and school in odor-free clothing, oversight of the family calendar, long-term planning and the TV remote.

She goes about her endless list of chores with steady deliberation. But every now and again, standing amid a landscape strewn with impossibly small Lego pieces, peanut butter sandwich crusts and dirty socks, something remarkable happens. The top of her head opens up, a blinding light erupts from her skull and she proclaims, “We can’t keep living like this!”

Typically, the kids and I will look up from the living room floor where we’ve been playing tickle monster, or watching the same episode of Wallace & Gromit for the 39th time, and naďvely ask, “Living like what?” But we quickly sense the sudden drop in barometric pressure as she inhales all our home’s oxygen, and before she speaks we furiously tidy until her skull closes back up.

One recent weekend, dreading the sweat-lodge torture of late-summer yard work and the lethargic, Gatorade-guzzling hours that would follow, I made a rookie mistake: I grumbled about it.

My wife’s face lit up. “I’ll mow the grass! You just need to go to Wal-Mart.”

This is a mission she routinely executes with our young son because he finds Wal-Mart to be an adventure so intoxicating it rivals his personal Graceland, Chuck E Cheese’s.

So … shopping, or heat stroke? Before I could say, “Be sure to press the choke at least 10 times!” she’d handed me the grocery list, and I heard the mower roar to life outside. So, the boy and I hurtled headlong into the swirling, back-to-school fury that is a Saturday morning at Wal-Mart.

“Things will go more smoothly if you go straight to the Legos and let him pick out a cheap little bag,” my wife had recently advised. “Not the boxes, don’t let him pick a box—those are twenty bucks.”

Naturally, he snatched a box containing 20,000 nano Lego pieces and clung to it with all his strength. But he was so mesmerized I was able to roll through the list: Box of wet wipes, check. Play-Doh, check. Googly eyes, check.

But the beguiling bounty of Wal Mart merchandise is a sexy seductress to the ferret-like mind of a 3-year-old. Soon, he was pleading to buy everything that was either colorful or looked like it would make a glorious mess. I said “no” more times than a Tea Partier to taxes, and by the time I’d loaded our $200 worth of “good grief, do we really need all this” stuff into our broiling car, I looked as though I had cut the grass.

We returned home and found the yard mown and my wife all fresh-faced and smiling. “A box of Legos? What a rookie,” she said. “Hey, I need to run some errands, then I’d like to work out at the Y. OK?”

You’re taking the kids with you, right?