Well that’s a strange toy for a kid’s meal

Nate had a really late night at work last night, and my head was killing me from my sinus infection, so we just decided to pick up some fast food on the way home.  (He still can’t drive, so I’m picking him up from work every night.)  However, we had one other errand that had to be run: buying a new plunger.  Ms. Maggie repeatedly clogs (or clugs, as she says it) the toilet by using way too much toilet paper, and it happened again yesterday.  But we’d thrown away our plunger recently (let’s just say it’s an incident involving a severe “clug” and Drano and leave it at that, mkay?), so we needed to run by some place to pick one up.  It happens that Lowe’s is right behind an Arby’s near our home.

To save time because it was so late, we decided to drop Nate at Lowe’s to run in and grab the plunger and have me drive through Arby’s and then come back and grab him.  We had assumed it would take him longer than it would me, but we’d forgotten one crucial factor: this is the slowest Arby’s on earth.  So when he called me to let me know he was done, I still had one car in front of me in the drive thru line.  It was a decent night out, and all Nate needed to do was cross the big parking lot, so we decided to have him walk.  But here’s the rub: he didn’t get a bag with the plunger.  He had assumed I’d be picking him up.

So he walked across the dark parking lot.  Plunger in hand.  Then walked up to my car in the drive thru line (where there were now 2 cars behind me).  And got in.

The two of us laughed almost to the point of tears at what the people in the cars behind us must have thought.  And the poor girl at the drive thru!  She’d been admiring the kiddos and chatting with Maggie when we first pulled up.  Then she walked away to get our food, and Nate got in the car in the meantime.  You should’ve seen the look of surprise on her face when she noticed him.  She was in mid-sentence, and stopped short, and said, “Oh, I didn’t even see you there before.”  We explained to her that he’d just gotten in the car after walking over from Lowe’s.  She looked at us like we were a little bit nuts, but she laughed good naturedly.

It’s a good thing she didn’t see the plunger.