My husband went out of town for two and a half days–that’s it. In the course of these two days my house became a hurricane of crap. Strewn from here to Havana I’ve got clothes, bottles, dishes, take-out containers, and baby toys. Not to mention the art projects I’ve got going on the floor of the den.

When the house is like this I start to lose my mind a little. All I do is walk into the kitchen and my mood turns foul. I also get a little crazy. I’m all Britney in a pink wig yelling wacky stuff and plotting major home improvement projects.

In one of these fits, I rushed off to Target to buy a storage ottoman. We don’t have a coffee table, and I thought one of those nifty items would provide us with a place to prop up our feet and a black hole to throw baby toys into. Dual purpose! Laziness and, well, sloth. Kind of sad, really.

So, I go to Target, baby in tow, to pick up an ottoman. Only problem is they don’t have the small kind–only the larger version. No biggie, the large one will look nice with the added bonus of holding more crap. It doesn’t fit in the cart, though, and OF COURSE it’s not in a box. I rest it across the top of the cart and push it to the register. I was certain that a Target employee would spot this madness and offer to help me. I was wrong. I passed a lot of Target employees, but none of them actually seemed interested in the plight of a woman who’s pushing an unwieldy ottoman and a baby through Super Target. I’m sure they had bigger things to worry about. Even when I checked out, the girl took no interest–she was polite enough to offer me the chance to save $12.00 by opening a Target charge card today–but ask me if I needed assistance getting my purchases to the car? Not so much.

I’m pushing my cart through the parking lot when it begins to rain.

Then, the ottoman falls off the cart.

When I get it back on the cart, I see that the faux leather now has a scratch. A man tells me that I should bring it back, but the thought of pushing baby and ottoman back across the parking lot, in the rain, into the store sounds pretty freakin’ terrible. I figure I’ll get the thing home and hubby can accompany me on a return trip to exchange it. I load sleeping babe into the car, pop the trunk and lo and behold.

It doesn’t fit.

At this point I gave some serious consideration to just leaving the thing in the parking lot–an eighty-dollar offering to the Gods of stupidity. A nice couple came along at that point, though, and insisted on helping me. They probably did that since I was sort-of crying on top of the ottoman sticking crazily out of my trunk.

Finally, we got the ottoman into the car with half of it in my lap and the old guy basically slamming the door shut into the other half.

My husband says he’ll return it tomorrow. That’s good because I would hate to have to kill someone.