True story

Brenda is going to help me bottle chicken tomorrow, and I'm so happy to be working hard on building our food supply (of both the emergency nasty stuff and the everyday stuff that we can rotate through). I feel very excited that I'm going to do something so completely "good Mormon mommyish." Brenda told me to go to Aldi because their chicken is 17 cents a pound.

I finally got out of the house with the youngest two kids by 10:00 (sidenote: I LOVE my kids, but boy was I excited to send the oldest two back to school today after winter break. It was just TIME). After an hour of many errands (gas station, local stores for supplies needed for scouts tomorrow, etc.), we made it to Aldi in North Kansas City. Logan, of course, had fallen asleep on the way. I briefly considered driving back home because I knew he'd be a BEAR when I had to wake him up.

We walk into Aldi, a discount food store that I've never been to. I can't find the carts, so stand there looking like an idiot. Finally I spot the carts outside. I pull on a cart and it's tied to all the other carts. I try to undo the mechanism, wondering why they are so concerned about losing their carts that they tie them together. No luck, so I go inside and ask a worker how I should go about getting a cart. She tells me I need to put a quarter in the cart. I walk back to the van (thinking what kind of world is this where I have to PAY for a CART? I didn't realize until later that you get your quarter back when you return it) and try to find a quarter. It took a few minutes but I finally found one under the mats. Woohoo!! I buy myself a stinkin' cart and pile the kids inside.

Logan starts screaming and arching his back when he realizes I am waking him up to stick him in the seat of another cart. I calm him down by giving him a pretend flute that his Grandma Ellefsen gave him for Christmas (Bonnie, you obviously haven't been around small children holding loud toys lately. You would know how quickly those cute toys become evil). Lindsey immediately starts singing a song very LOUDLY that goes like this: "Mickey Mouse peed on a house! What color was it?" I give her a funny look and ask where she heard that song. She replies that her oldest brother taught her. Big shock. She starts to sing louder.

There are such amazing deals at Aldi that I spend over an hour piling up my cart, while asking Lindsey to PLEASE stop singing the annoying Mickey Mouse song, and bouncing Logan on my hip so he'll stop screaming/making a horrible noise with his flute.

When I get to the checkout desk I pile all my food on the counter. After I'm told the grand total, I ask what kind of payment is accepted at the store. I am told they take cash, Discover, and debit cards. I have a check, Visa and Mastercard. The lady tells me she'll hold my food for me if I want to go next door to a bank and use the ATM. Good idea, so I take the kids out to the van before I realize that my ATM card doesn't work anymore. It becomes obsolete if I go 3 months without using it, and it's definitely been at least 3 months.

The tension is rising and the kids are not happy campers. I go across the street to Target and wait in line at the Customer Service counter to get some cash. They tell me they can't give me $300 in cash for a check. I look in their phone book and call the nearest Citizen's Bank, because I DO NOT want to have to drive all the way back to Kearney to get cash at my bank. The only other Citizen's is farther than Kearney.

We get back in the van and drive all the way back to Kearney (20 minutes) to get cash at the bank. I look in all the crevices of the van and find 2 lifesaving Dum-Dum suckers. Such a tender mercy for me because it keeps the screaming mouths busy.

I get cash from the bank and procede to drive all the way back to Aldi. I'm afraid they will have put my food away by now because it's been an hour. When I walk in, my cart is still full of my food. Since I'm choosing to see the positives in the story, I'm thankful that my food hadn't been put away yet! I pay for the food and wait for them to bag it up.

They don't have bags at Aldi. You're supposed to bring your own.

Are you kidding me? So I roll my cart out to the van and start chucking food inside. The last thing left in the cart is the box of 8 whole chickens I've bought. I take my cart back and retrieve my quarter before picking up the final box of chicken and walking it back to the van.

On the way to the van, the box breaks and chickens go rolling EVERYWHERE under the cars. By this time, I'm actually laughing out loud so that I don't start to cry. I round up the chickens and head back home.

The next two hours were spent rearranging the storage room to accomodate all the new purchases. Now I am cooking the chickens to prepare for the big bottling event tomorrow. This is the grossest thing I have ever done. Giblets and pulling the legs apart and ewww, ewww, ewww! Ryan is the meat-toucher in our family. I don't touch meat unless it's with a fork and I'm throwing it into the crockpot.

When Ryan walks in the door in a minute, I have a sneaking suspicion that he's going to look around the kitchen and wonder what on earth I did today, since last night's dinner dishes are still stacked up on the counter.

Well, at least I know Heavenly Father appreciates me for trying to build up my food storage. Even if it did make me say some not-so-choice words in my head while accomplishing the task.