PRINGLES WERE ON SALE

Pringles were on sale.

Perhaps I should have written that sentence with a few exclamation marks. Let me try again.

PRINGLES WERE ON SALE!!!!

Ruby and Sadie came into do some grocery shopping with us completely uninspired by the idea of, in their minds, drudging around the store while we shopped. We got a cart, one that was hard to push, and the girls took turns pushing it, enjoying the challenge of just trying to get it to turn. We came up with a couple of games, 'Spot the ...' is a great game for finding stuff in a store. Find the diced tomatoes in this huge mess of canned tomatoes.

But things lit up when we went by a bin full of PRINGLES ON SALE. And apparently PRINGLES ARE THE VERY BEST KIND OF CHIP AND WE LOVE PRINGLES SOOOO MUCH. Sometimes children speak in ALL CAPS. So the deal was 2 for 4 dollars. They both love the Cheddar Cheese Pringles more than any other flavour and they could cope with the regular ones if they couldn't find the cheese. Then it began.

They tore into that bin pushing the tubes this way and that on a treasure hunt, for real, each of them burrowing into the bin. I sat back and enjoyed them enjoying the hunt. Some people came by and looked at me and then at the kids and of those some had sad smiles and shook their heads at my lack of concerns about two girls half buried in Pringles tins. But, me, I didn't care. They weren't loud. They weren't in the way. They weren't doing any harm. And they were having fun. And a lot of it.

When they came up for air they had found the one cheddar cheese tin in the bin and the one regular tin. Victory. They would have preferred two of the cheese, but this would do. Sadie and Joe headed off to get something and Ruby and I took the cart and turned to go down another aisle. It was then that Ruby noticed that there was a shelf full of nothing but cheddar cheese Pringles. Laughingly the swap was made.

I rolled along thinking of the looks I'd gotten for being lenient about their frantic search. (Again, big deal. It's a bin of Pringles.) I remembered Ruby telling her mom about being somewhere where the adults supervising were strict and took the fun out of things. She was bemoaning what happens to adults that makes them that way. Joe and I protested. She said, "Not you guys, you're not adults, you're ... you're ... you're really old kids."

We laughed a lot at the description.

And we decided that that's a pretty good way to be thought about.

Agree?