Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Tales From Vacation- Snack Attack (Which is Admittedly Weird, Especially Since There Was an Alligator)

Yesterday afternoon I got home after a week in Florida with my family. We had a great time and it was mostly drama-free, with a few noted exceptions. The first was car trouble. My youngest sister blew two tires on the highway on the way down, then inexplicably had a dead battery (not left-the-lights-on dead. Dead-dead. Needed a new battery dead) a couple of days later. She ended up shelling out nearly $400 in car repairs. Then Rodolfo's water pump died on his car when we were on our way back, an hour from home. That was also $400. So much for saving money by driving. The second mini-drama was related to my apparently calling my 2 year old niece morbidly obese or something and/or telling a grown man to stop calling a 13 year old boy a douche bag. Those blew over pretty quickly though.

The other little drama was snack-related. I'm sorry, did that last sentence sound as ridiculous to you as it did in my head? SNACK-RELATED DRAMA, you guys. Seriously. Let me take it from the beginning:

As I said, we were driving down. Myself, Caitlyn and Rodolfo in his car (yes, we are still separated, in case you were wondering), my mom, step-dad and oldest nephew in her car, our middle sister, her husband and their son in his car and my youngest sister, her boyfriend and their daughter in his car. 4 cars and 3 toddlers. So I decided to make little snack packs for all the kids. I bought ziploc bags and separated portions of goldfish, crackers, and veggie chips for each kid, then threw in a few packs of gummy snacks and juice boxes for everyone. I even made up a ziploc bag for each of them filled with some crayons and folded up paper so they would all have one more thing to keep them occupied for the long trip.

I'd thought of everything. The drinks were boxed, so no one needed to try to pour juice into a sippy cup in a moving car. The snacks were the least messy I could think of. I even provided activities! I was feeling very smug about the whole thing when I texted my mom and sisters to let them know that I'd provided snacks for all the kids, so they needn't worry about it. Obviously they were all grateful. Who wouldn't be?

The ensuing drama had nothing to do with the car snacks, honestly. Everyone loved my awesome car snacks. I only brought it up so you all know how incredibly efficient I am. Okay. Not really (maybe a little though). My point is that I had provided snacks, and I made everyone aware of that fact beforehand (a full 24 hours in advance, even, which is like an eternity in my procrastinatey family). That being said, when you have a toddler, you tend to plan for every scenario. I fully expected that my sisters would also bring snacks along, because what if my nephew decided he hated everything I brought? What if my niece... I don't know, fed all her snacks to an alligator or something (we actually had an alligator in our backyard and an old man standing at the edge of the swamp/lake just begging to be eaten)?

Anyway. We arrived Monday night and went grocery shopping for the week. It was just us girls at the store, and we decided to give Sammi a break, since she had all the car trouble, and split the bill between myself, my mom and my other sister, April (yeah. I'm just gonna use her name now. NO1CURR). So we went about finding what we thought we would need for the week.

Everyone had certain special things they wanted. I picked up some Kashi cereal bars I like, frozen smoothie mix for Rodolfo, and pickles for my burgers. Sammi wanted Fruit Loops and Ramen noodles. My mom... I don't even know, but I'm sure she picked up one certain thing that wouldn't have necessarily been on anyone else's list. Then there was April. Here is the list of things April needed specifically for herself and her family (I should emphasize that she did share if anyone wanted anything. It's not that she was being selfish in that way. She was just being selfish in the way that she made the rest of us split the cost of her excess):

Double-Stuff Oreos
Family Sized bag of M&Ms
Cheerios
Cinnamon Chex ("I need variety, Jaclyn", she responded pissily when I asked if we really needed 3 different kinds of cereal- "besides, I don't eat Fruit Loops")
Apples and Grapes
Coffeemate
2 boxes of frozen mini-pancakes (because despite the fact that we bought pancake mix, she insisted that her son would only eat the frozen mini ones)
Lysol Wipes (she insisted these were "for the house", even though everyone else thought paper towels were perfectly fine)

My mom and Sammi and I were annoyed, especially since Sammi, despite already being out $280 in car repairs at this point, had to practically be bound and gagged before she would let us pay for her fucking Fruit Loops and Ramen noodles. But it was April's vacation too. We all sort of rolled our eyes and moved on.

This is the point where you understand why I mentioned the car snacks I brought. Because when we got back and unpacked our groceries, everyone also started unpacking their personal stuff too. This is when we saw the stash of snacks that April had brought from home (please note that I don't mean she brought a few of anything. These were all regular sizes boxes of shit):

EL Fudge cookies
Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies
Teddy Grahams- vanilla
Teddy Grahams- chocolate
Wheat Thins
Assorted bag of Starbursts and Skittles (you know, those giant bags you buy to distribute for Halloween)

A full day passed before April became displeased with the "variety" of snacks available to her. I woke up Wednesday morning to see her returning from Target, where she bought:

Target bakery sugar cookies
Target bakery chocolate chip cookies
2 boxes of chocolate chip granola bars
2 family sized boxes of Pop-Tarts
Milano cookies
A giant bag of popcorn
A box of microwave popcorn
5 candy bars (these, she informed everyone, were just for her though- no sharing!)
a cheesecake
3 bags of assorted varieties of potato chips (family sized, of course)

If we had planned to stay for a month, this would still be an absolutely ridiculous amount of snacks. And we did actually buy food too! And soda. Seemingly gallons of it disappeared while we were there. I won't say I didn't eat any snacks or drink any soda. I certainly did, but if I'd had my way, I wouldn't have had all this shit sitting there for me to eat in the first place!

I guess my point is that I hope my sister doesn't get diabetes? Also, my mom reads this blog, so she can confirm that this is absolutely not an exaggeration. I actually wrote down the list of snacks because it was so ridiculous to me that I knew it would be a blog post on the very first night.

Anyway. There's lots of other stuff. I promise some pictures of me swimming with a dolphin and also another post about all the ways in which my dad fails at life (he watched my dog while I was away. Stop thinking "well, that was nice of him"- you haven't heard the story yet).

3 comments:

Michael Romero said...

I don't think that you're being upfront enough about this. Consider that we did not have that many snacks for spending a week in a cabin in the woods in Virginia, and that was 5 grown ass people and we did a good job of eating up most of the food we bought for the trip. JFC that's a lot of snacks.

Gia said...

Yikes. Don't say "I told you so" when she gets diabetes. Just accept it.

Unknown said...

I can't understand how you eat that much crap. And I'm a fatty that likes candy a LOT but you would have to be CONSTANTLY snacking all damn day long to need that many snacks. I feel so much better about eating a cookie for breakfast now!