The Roaches, Superman, and the Target Nazis

So according to a comment on our zoo post, it is not acceptible for grown men to wear the superman logo (unless you happen to be superman presumably). It so happens that when the kids were playing on the jungle gym at the zoo a little girl ran by and very excitedly said, "Daddy! Look! It's SUPERMAN!" Oh yeah, that's me baby.

I admit the shirt was not a Father's Day gift. I did not, however, buy it for myself either. This is the story of the roaches, and how, for a day, Daddy was really the hero.

So the first week we were here, every morning would reveal a cockroach or two already dead or in its death throws. No big deal. I would take care of them before anybody else was up and there was no problem. Well, apparently I either forgot to do that one morning or it just happened to be the day of the roaches, but when Katie and the kids woke up they were barricaded in their rooms, trapped by nearly dead exoskeletal intruders. Finally, Katie decided that she would pay the price of freedom. Charging from her room she lept over entire patches of one or two roaches in a single bound to race to the vacuum and vanquish the captors. Laughing maniacally, she sucked the suckers up while Ben practiced his counting skills to keep track of the ones she had got. (The vacuum has a removable clear chamber instead of a bag). The roaches had planned a clever counter attack however.

With Andrew sleeping up stairs, a roach had strategically died in such a way that Katie had set the vacuum on one of the stairs while standing below in the part of executioner. As she let fly the fatal blow with the able blade of her vacuum a combination of gravity, balance, and roach appeal came together in such a way as to knock over the vacuum. The clear plastic prison broke free from the main body of her Excalibur freeing it's renegade occupants, whose dead bodies immediatley setup a barricade to hold hostage her precious sleeping babe.

I received a very frantic, nay, a series of very frantic voice mails and text messages at work the next day. I very nearly didn't receive them as I had forgotten to charge my phone the night before. It was clear that life as we know it would end if I did not act. So jumping into my phone booth I realized that I was fresh out of superman outfits to wear as underwear and I was forced to return home and save the day in my work clothes.

When I returned home that night I received a great thank you package which included dark chocolate and a new superman t-shirt. The kids, though grateful, immediatley tried to scam me out of the chocolate but they let me keep the shirt.

Now for the Target Nazi's. If you already guessed that my shirt was bought at Target, and you know Katie, you can probably guess the end of the story. Along with my shirt, they had purchased that day the hats that you see everyone wearing in the zoo pictures. The next time that Katie went to Target she noticed that the hats she had just bought were now on sale a mere couple days after the initial purchase. So like clock work Katie whipped out her reciept, went to customer service, and expected to be refunded the difference. Only they weren't going to refund her the difference. They wanted her to fully return the items and then rebuy them with three kids hanging off of her and the items at home. That got her steamed enough, but what really broke the dam was when she went to buy other items that day that were on sale she was informed that the sale had actually already ended and they just hadn't bothered to change any of the signs. By the time she got home she was almost as mad as the Petrified Forrest incident. SO, back I went that night to return everything she had just bought there including my superman shirt. The kicker is that Ben's hat was actually more than the other hats they had bought, unbeknownst to me. When I got back that night and Katie saw that they had returned it for the same amount as the other hats it was too much. She didn't sleep all night...

Please keep a look out for our little doggy while keeping up with our posts (see below).