The Mall with Maizie

Today I had to get a present so I headed out to the mall. If this were a normal school day I would have my usual sidekick with me, but since there was no school today I decide to take Maizie, alone. Let’s just say that this caused quite an uproar before I left the house and as we drove away (a pathetic screaming little girl in the window).

Maizie is a very quiet and shy. One thing she loves to do is go to the mall, not go to stores in the mall, walk around the mall. When she’s in middle school she will be one of those girls that just walk around the mall all the time. She won’t necessarily buy anything (except an Awful Awful), just walk and walk. When we go into a store it takes less than five minutes before she asks to go back into the mall.

When we walk by the Purell dispenser in the middle of the mall (across from Pinkberry), she HAS to get some. Sometimes she tries to roll up her sleeves or asks me to hold her coat so she can get some. My reply to her is always, “What? Are you going to take a bath with it? We’re in the mall.” That usually gets the point across. Along with the Purell stop she also NEEDS an Awful Awful (today she opted for strawberry).

We were in a store with many, many breakable things and she had to put strawberry fingerprints on everything. It didn’t matter how many times I asked her not to touch. The more I asked the bigger challenge it became (How many things can I touch before she catches me?).

The mall may be the one and only place where I can tell her “No” and she won’t go it a grand mal tantrum over it. We passed the candy store and she wanted to go in, but I told her she had gotten the “shake” and she couldn’t have candy now because she’d get “the sugar” (big fear for my kids). That’s it, no problem we just kept on walking. If we were home there would have been yelling, tongues being stuck out, foot stomping and probably some swearing (and that’s just me…just kidding…maybe by the end of the argument) but because we were in THE MALL, all was fine in Maizie’s World.

I had parked at Jordan’s and when we went to leave she wanted to ride the escalator. We get to the top and had to walk through the maze of living rooms so Maizie could check out all the accessories. She’s was mostly fascinated by the fake plants and grass. Of course she had to touch them all and at one point I almost knocked down a display because my big rump was having a hard time trying get to a table to “feel” the grass on one of the tables.

Once out of the furniture maze, the water show was about to start so we headed in there. I have to sit through the whole thing with my eyes closed so a laser doesn’t trigger a migraine, but she’s loving it.