Wonder Woman Goes Rogue In a World Of Evil Monkeys

It’s been one of those weeks with kids where, despite all our good intentions, we ended up eating way too many tacos and frozen pizzas.

You know how it is…. I kept meaning to make beef slow-cooker stew, but kept forgetting to pull steak out of our freezer because our two-year-old daughter, Bridget, has been waking up around 3:45 AM each morning to shriek inconsolably for a couple hours.

Take THAT, evil monkeys!

I have no idea what’s going on and all I can get out of her is the word “mankeys,” said repeatedly in a panicked voice. I can only assume she’s having evil monkey nightmares which climax in her bloodcurdling screams.

They must be godawful scary monkeys, from what I can tell.

Hopefully, we’ll get to the bottom of it. But in the meantime, I decided everyone really needed a proper meal. Desperately needing a break, I asked John to take our four-year-old daughter, Brontë, to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients. Someone needed to stay home with Bridget, anyway, while she slept off yet another crazed monkey hangover.

So John took Brontë to the grocery store, where they had a good time. After finding her Wonder Woman tiara in the backseat of our car, Brontë put it on and talked about saving the day for the rest of the ride.

Wonder Woman in the backseat

In the store, John told her she could “save the day” by grabbing food off our list and putting it into the cart. This method has been working well, by the way, for minimizing grocery store tantrums. Brontë seems less bored when she’s involved in the process.

And I heard she mostly did a great job, apart from when he asked her to to grab celery and she came back with some fruity Starbucks drink instead.

Well, everything was fine until they came back home, where John piled all the grocery bags on the kitchen table. In the middle of putting everything away, he reaches into one of the bags and pulls out a ginormous bag of gummy bears.

He drops it to the table with a THUD. We both stare at it.

Brontë stops in her tracks, puts her hands on her hips and says, “Whoa! Look at that!”

“I wasn’t expecting that,” John said.

And Brontë, feigning shock, says, “Wow, yeah… that’s really weird.”

John bunches up his eyebrows. “So, that giant bag of gummy bears just happened to fall inside our cart?”

 

Finally, Brontë flings both her arms over her head:

“FINE. OKAY, I GRABBED THEM. You caught me, guys… IT WAS ME!” Then she ran to her room in a panic and slammed the door.

(She really caved under the slightest pressure, didn’t she?)

Maybe she’d been inspired by her baby sister’s attempted chocolate heist last week, but I’m not sure how she thought she could pull this off. First of all, she’s obsessed with gummy bears and everyone knows it. She sings the gummy bear song all the time. A better move leading up to this crime would’ve been faking gummy bear nonchalance.

I still can’t help being impressed that she managed to grab such a huge bag, slip it into the cart unnoticed, then play stupid while the checker was ringing it out. But she overlooked one critical element: she needed to pay attention to which grocery bag contained the contraband, so she could later create a distraction and then make off with the goods.

A fine effort, I have to say. she needed to iron out a few kinks.