Oh the value of a $1.00

We just came home from a 45 min. trip to the Dollar Store. Forty-five min. to and from a store that is maybe a mile down the road.
Dean's mom is so nice. She sent the kids each $1.00 for Valentine's Day!! They acted like they had won the lottery. (don't you wish you could be so thrilled with $1.00?) The second they realized they all had $1.00 in their cards, the dreaded sentence emerged, "can we go to the Dollar Store?" Uggggg!!! Now mind you, our town has probably one of the best Dollar Stores around, and we do frequent "outings" to it just to get out of the house, but does that mean I like it? Absolutly not!! I tend to be a in the store, get what I need, and then get out kind of shopper. So, spending 45 min. in a dollar store is pure torture for me. And in one aisle alone too yet. They all have to first brouse the aisle and take in every last item. Then they have to touch every item, which ultimatly ends up with it being deposited in the middle of the aisle left for mom to pick up and try to figure out where the heck it came from and where the heck to put it back, all the while trying to either hold Tessa or retrieve her from another aisle that she has wandered off to. Only to go and find Tessa in another aisle, depositing her own findings and mom crawling around on the floor picking things up in a frantic as Tessa manhandles everything in sight. To go back to the $1 aisle to find yet again 50 items on the floor that the kids found were not "appropriate" for them to buy. Forty-five minutes later, 2 breakdowns from kids who "5 more minutes" just wasn't enough time left to make their decisions, 50+ items in completely wrong places on the shelves (I gave up!!), and 3 $1 items in the car back home. To get home and have the "magic wand" Josie bought break in 5 minutes, to the diary Elli bought find out only contains 3 pages (which for a 5 year old who can't even write yet is fine) and the foo-foo pen not even work, to the toy dart gun Thys got have a wretched smell of plastic that he won't even play with it. Oh, how my mother in law is just laughing her head off. Do you think she knew what she was doing when she sent those 3 little $1 bills? I think she owes me a lot of money for therepy I will need after that trip!!