I should just never invite people over

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First Time in Target Since Early March; Not Trick-or-Treating

Man, I really hate my current blog background.

While I have gotten back into “normal” grocery shopping, and have visited Costco a couple of times over the past seven months, I have not been inside Target since the pandemic began. This is thanks to their super awesome curbside pickup offering, where you order stuff and drive to the store and someone is walking out to meet you practically the instant you arrive. (And if something you ordered isn’t actually available in the store, Target will ship it to you for free.) It’s excellent and contact free and I love it.

But.

Not EVERYTHING is available via curbside pickup. And I have begun to really need some of those things, including cleaning spray and hand soap. At one point, I was able to get hand soap via curbside, but it was only once; it has been unavailable ever since. And for some reason, I can’t order it online to be delivered. Well. They have their reasons.

So I have been thinking about making a trip TO Target for awhile now. What’s been holding me back is a) a desire to avoid most places, as per my pandemic usual and b) the last time I went there, it was such a dystopian nightmare, it really turned me off. That was back in the height of early paper towel hoarding, when the paper goods aisles were picked clean and there was no soap or Purell anywhere to be found and I was trying very hard to fill my cart with measured and reasonable amounts of cereal and pasta and wine despite the doom and dread coursing through my veins. 

A friend of mine has been inside Target several times, and, as she is still uncomfortable in the grocery store, I felt like maybe a trip to Target was workable. (Plus, she once got me two! bottles! of bleach spray on a trip to Target, and I have heard whisperings about a supply of antibacterial wipes, so… the temptation is strong.)

So I girded my… loins is the only word I am coming up with here, but that seems wholly inaccurate and also I don’t really like the word “loins.” 

Let’s try something else. I steeled my nerves and drove to Target after I dropped Carla off. 

Immediately I ran into a sticking point. There was a big sign out front that said something like, “Line starts here for our most vulnerable customers.”

It was an odd and oddly worded sign. There were no hours posted, and no one was in line… so I just… went in. But I felt oddly guilty about it. Was I intruding on Vulnerable Customers Time? I don’t know! I suppose I could have looked it up on my phone but I was a) flustered by the sign and b) dealing with partially fogged eyeglasses and b) STEELED, so I just powered through. 

A staff member pointed to a row of carts and told me they were sanitized, so I took one. There were footstep stickers on the floor in the main aisle – the one that abuts the checkout lanes – but no stickers elsewhere. 

The kids’ clothing section looked and felt normal. But then I got into the cleaning aisles and… well. It still looks like a dystopian nightmare. The soap aisle only had a handful of soap products, and what was available was more in the dish soap category than in the hand soap arena, which was very limited. I was able to get a refill of the soap I prefer in the kitchen, and a refill of a lesser-preferred soap. I am kicking myself for not getting a couple of smaller bottles of hand soap, but we do have some bottles already, and now I can refill them. 

The cleansing spray aisle was VERY sparse. Sure, there were some sprays here and there on the shelves, but I felt panicky and unsure about the items that were left. Like… there seemed to be plenty of Method and Seventh Generation products, but I’m not familiar with those as cleaning agents. And they were so abundant (“abundant”) compared to things like Lysol and Clorox that I looked at them askance; why were so many left behind? Does that mean that they aren’t actually as good at CLEANING? What do all the other Target shoppers know that I do not? And, while it may not be obvious based on my comment awhile back, there wasn’t a Lysol or a Clorox product to be found. No bleach spray, although the actual pourable bleach seemed to be well stocked. (I have plenty of that, but I really dislike and lack confidence in my ability to make my own bleach spray, so I want someone else [CLOROX] to package it for me.) 

There was a section of antibacterial wipes, although none of the brands I am familiar with. I grabbed a container of the Up & Up brand for fake legitimacy reasons; I have been skittish about buying off-brand wipes, even though they pop up pretty frequently these days. While I can look at a hand sanitizer and see that is has the correct percentage of alcohol, wipes are different. I have no idea what chemicals to look for in wipes to know that they are legit. 

The toilet cleaning options were next to nil; again, all that remained were the “fancy” cleansers that I don’t know and so don’t yet trust. I want bleach in my toilets, you know? Not citric acid.  

The paper towel aisle was empty but for one tiny corner. I grabbed a package even though I keep TELLING myself that paper towels are NOT a necessity; we have reusable paper towels and plenty of microfiber cloths and we can MAKE DO. But it is hard not to be swept up in paper towel mania. (Even when the paper towels cost SEVENTEEN AMERICAN DOLLARS OMG.) I did not look at the toilet paper situation.

There was a brand new aisle of ONLY hand sanitizer. The only brand name I recognized was Suave. The shelves carried all different brands and a variety of sizes of containers. Purell was not among them.

Most concerning – moreso than the empty shelves – was the return of signs saying that customers were limited to one item apiece. I mean, maybe Target has had those signs all along (although my friend buying me two entire bottles of bleach spray would indicate otherwise), but my grocery store eliminated those signs weeks ago. But at Target, only one canister (how does canister only have one N?) of wipes, one package of paper towels, one bottle of cleaning spray, etc.

The Halloween section was, understandably, very picked-over and messy. It’s like that every year, but it felt different this year. 

There is still no Hormel pepperoni. 

The food aisles seemed fairly well stocked: flour and yeast and sugar and olive oil and cereal and tea. They had very limited options for boxed cake mix, which seemed odd. I didn’t go into the pasta or canned goods aisles, so I can’t speak to them. I’ve heard there’s a shortage of aluminum, but there seemed to be plenty of soda. (And if you buy $20 worth of soda, you get a $5 gift card! Of course the 12-packs are conveniently $4.89.)

There were maybe ten other customers in Target at the same time. Perhaps it was always that empty at 8:15 on a Wednesday morning, but it added to my feeling of foreboding.

When I checked out, I had to wait six feet away from the register, and then wait for the staff person to call me before I could put my items on the belt. I stood there, as I usually do, to watch the prices scan on the computer screen… but I was flustered, and had just realized that I’d forgotten to scan my items through my Target Circle app (I am out of practice!), and plus I didn’t want to get too close to the checker, even though she was behind plexiglass panels. So who knows if they overcharged me. I guess I can look at my receipt, genius. But at the time I was just eager to get OUT of Target. And possibly never return. 

AFTER Target, I had to go to the grocery store. We are having a Halloween Party (ha! Not really. We are having one of the three families we have socialized with during the pandemic over for an outdoor candy hunt and dinner on our back porch. We feel that this family has been very risk-averse, and have gotten together with them twice already: once for a hike and once for lunch in their backyard. There will be seven of us total, wearing masks until we are eating, and I have configured our back porch with three tables so the adults can sit six feet apart at the big table and the kids who are siblings can sit at one small table near their parents and my kid can sit six feet away at her own table.) and I needed to get some supplies. My grocery store has really seemed to be back to normal (we can even bring our own reusable bags again!), but I checked the cleanser aisle today (I got some 409 there the other day and was hopeful for toilet-bowl cleaner) and it was nearly empty, PLUS there was a sign saying that all cleansers were only one-per-person. So. Make of that what you may. 

Plus, the pasta aisle seemed to be a little light on the pasta. Maybe it’s just a normal low before restocking, but everything feels so portentous these days.

I need more gin, but I will order that for curbside pickup from the grocery store that offers this option.

Just for completeness: For our Halloween party dinner, we are serving chicken, wild rice and mushroom soup, bread, and my favorite fall salad for dinner to the grown ups. For the kids, who are of course welcome but unlikely to eat those things, I am making mummy hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. Carla and I will make monster cookies for dessert. Since the kids aren’t trick-or-treating this year, I made up some gift bags with little treats in them, and plan to hide them around the yard. I also set up this elaborate contraption that is a bunch of plastic cups wrapped in orange crepe paper and arranged on a poster board to look like a pumpkin; the cups each have a little treat in them: candy, erasers, stickers, barrettes with colorful hair, hair ties, spider rings, glow sticks. Yes I have gone completely overboard, and yes this is basically two separate and very time consuming methods for the kids to get the same exact junk, but also I am having Feelings about not letting Carla trick-or-treat. (She has accepted this ruling without argument, by the way.) 

Oh, okay, I guess I want to talk about this, too. 

We have a lovely little cul-de-sac with wonderful neighbors who all know and adore Carla (mainly because she knows and adores their dogs). They all want to know if she is trick-or-treating this year, and I have been hedging. But she is NOT, and I feel good if sad about that plan.

A parent of one of Carla’s friends is doing the opposite. She feels that trick-or-treating is very low-risk, being outside and all, and that so many things have been taken from our kids that we shouldn’t take this holiday from them.

I see her point. And I even AGREE that I am being overly cautious here. It’s probably FINE to let your kids go trick-or-treating! No one in our county has said that people can’t do it. I haven’t read (or, to be fair, seen) any articles about whether it’s a good or bad idea. It takes place outside; the risk of contracting Covid from a physical object seems to be pretty low; the contact with other people would be fairly limited. It’s probably FINE.

And maybe it seems contradictory or weird that we are okay having dinner with another family while we are not okay with trick-or-treating. And I get that! You may be looking at me askance — I go into Target AND the grocery store in a single day, plus I am having people over for dinner? And yet I am squicky about trick-or-treating? Trying to assess individual risk is full of contradictions.

The end result is that we are still, out of an over-abundance of caution, keeping Carla home. (And we are not handing out candy. Carla and I may, if we have the energy, try to create a Halloween-y chalk obstacle course on our sidewalk, just to give kids a little something fun to do/make fun of. But we may not, also.) 

I guess what it comes down to, for me, is three things: 1) If lots of people decide to allow their kids to trick-or-treat, there will be crowds of kids on our street. Hundreds of people come to our neighborhood each year, and this year Halloween is on a Saturday AND we expect to have decent weather, so it could be MANY MORE than normal. I don’t know. The thought of Carla walking through a crush of children, hopefully wearing masks but who knows, gives me palpitations. 2) Carla’s school has been very explicit about how limiting infections is a school-community responsibility; it does not feel to me like we would be honoring that responsibility if we allowed her to trick-or-treat. Obviously, other people will have a different read. And the school has not come out and said, “Please don’t trick-or-treat.” But I am trying to take our membership in the school community seriously. 3) I do not think I can count on our lovely, kind, generous neighbors to all wear masks. Some of them have voiced opinions that imply that they do not believe Covid is being accurately represented by our media, i.e. that it will be over as soon as the election concludes, and some of them have also shared with me social plans that involved many people, which implies that they may not have the same risk assessment of the situation that I do. So having Carla go door to door where these kind, lovely people (I feel like my attempt to be really clear that they ARE kind and lovely people is now making it sound like I believe the opposite) will undoubtedly want to talk to her makes me nervous. 4) I guess there is a fourth reason, and that is that if Carla DOES get Covid after/because of Halloween, the contact tracing might be impossible.

ANYWAY. That is all to say that I am overdoing it in terms of trying to make the evening special for her and the two little friends who will be with us this weekend. I know — I KNOW — that they would have been fine if we hid a few Snickers bars around the yard and called it a day. But I think a lot of my own sadness about this year — no birthday party for Carla! no trick-or-treating! no family at Christmas or Thanksgiving! — is finding an outlet in putting a bunch of silly gift bags together for these three children.

How are YOU handling Halloween? Have YOU ventured into Target? Are you just SO SICK of all of this?

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And Now We Move on to the Next Entertaining Fret

It is really too late to fret about this now, because it’s HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND, but that means I’m in Prime Fretting Headspace.

We are having Carla’s birthday party this weekend, and TWENTY PEOPLE will be here. Okay, eighteen. But that’s VERY CLOSE TO TWENTY. I have never had so many people at my house before.

Things that I am fretting over:

1. The Food: Because my husband has kindly and gently pointed out that one of the reasons I find entertaining so stressful, we are outsourcing the food. We are getting a big sandwich tray, along with some pasta salad, and some chips. I am TRYING to resist the urge to make homemade guacamole and salsa. We’ll see if I succeed.

I also really REALLY wanted to make macarons, but my husband gently and kindly persuaded me not to. And he’s right: they are time intensive and also finicky and I can imagine the feet not setting correctly and feeling frustrated and panicked. So. No macarons. Instead, we are ordering an ice cream cake.

Will we have enough food? Will people like it?

And what about alcohol? How much beer and wine do you need to buy for twelve adults? We don’t have anything resembling a cooler, so I bought two big plastic tubs from Target for $5.99 apiece that I’m planning to fill with ice and drinks.

Besides beer and wine, what’s appropriate to offer as drinks? I got some bottled water (although Target didn’t have EITHER Dasani or Aquafina – my preferred brands – and I had to buy Ice Mountain instead) and a box of fun-sounding La Croix. We have tons of diet soda already, but we don’t drink non-diet soda. Do we need to buy any?

2. The Décor: This is supposed to be a birthday party, so I want it to be somewhat festive. But I also don’t want to go too overboard. My ORIGINAL idea was to match the decorations to Carla’s dress, which is orange and blue and white.

 

Birthday dress

It’s from Gymboree and it looks like I’m going to have to IRON the hem.

So I got some navy blue plates and cups and napkins and tablecloth and balloons and a “Happy Birthday” banner from Target. And some of those little poof things you hang from the ceiling. And a little banner for the cake. Man, Target really knows how to get you to spend a LOT of money on single-use stuff.

Blue party supplies

Image from Target.com

But I cannot find coordinating ORANGE decorations anywhere! Even my local Party Place only had about five orange balloons. I guess that will have to be enough.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I did find the following from Amazon. But they are asking $12.95 for eight settings. Target charges $2.00 for 10 9-inch plates, $3.00 for 10 cups, $2.00 for 20 napkins.

Orange plates

Image from Amazon.com

Dammit, now I see that Target has orange party supplies ONLINE, so I could have ordered them! But now I am out of time! ACK.

And I was going to do blue macarons and orange macarons. But THAT’S not happening. So now I’m feeling like the décor will be half-assed.

3. The State of My House, Indoors and Outdoors: My house is my house, right? But whenever actual PEOPLE are going to spend time here, I start worrying about whether it is too shabby or too dirty or too cramped. Do we have enough chairs? No, no we don’t. Is there enough room in the living room? Nope, not at all.

Hopefully the weather will cooperate, and we can divide our time between inside and being in the backyard. I mean, I am REALLY counting on being able to throw all six of the kids into the yard so they can play.

But the deck is… well, if we are being charitable, it is “distressed” at best. And the latticework that ostensibly keeps creatures from setting up apartments under the deck is very beat up. The long side that faces the yard has fallen in completely, and it looks terrible. But THAT’S not going to be different by this weekend.

And I have been spending ALL SUMMER searching for cushions for our rag-tag collection of seating on the deck with NO LUCK. So finally this past weekend, in a panic, I ordered some things that might (fingers crossed) work, and those are going to arrive tomorrow HOPEFULLY.

What if it RAINS? What in heaven’s name will I do with six toddlers? I suppose I could spend a couple of hours making the basement more child-friendly, and just toss them all down there.

4. Entertainment for the Kids: I think here is one area where I am allowing COMPARISONS to freak me out. We recently went to a birthday party where the kids were all playing outside while the adults were eating and drinking. And somehow THAT party has become The Benchmark, and I know – I KNOW – Carla’s party won’t measure up.

It was her best friend’s party. And they have different circumstances than we do. A much larger house and yard, for one thing. And a nanny-share situation that means they have a TON of toys. But the party included: a massive trampoline, a bounce house, a mini-swimming pool, and a sprinkler.

We just don’t have those things, and nor would I want ANY of them, really. But since we DON’T have any of those things, I am fretting about what the kids will DO outside.

My mother-in-law has apparently bought us some sort of sprinkling apparatus. We have a small water table. Carla has a little tiny play structure with a small slide and a little hidey-hole underneath. She has a table with benches and an umbrella. She has a mini-trampoline that one person can use. There are various balls and bats and a little lawnmower. I think the kids will have things to play with. No one is going to be standing in the middle of the yard, staring in boredom at the grass.

I didn’t feel like doing gift bags (is this the wrong way to go?), but I did get every child a bubble wand. So they can play with bubbles.

Is this enough?

I am fighting the urge to hire a magician or that guy who comes equipped with turtles and armadillos and an alligator.

5. The Mix of People: We have invited:

  • Family A: One of our closest friend families. One of our family friend families. A family of close friends.
  • Family B: Another family that we’ve known for years but don’t see as often.
  • Family C: Another family that we’ve known for years, and frankly I would LOVE to get to know them better, but until now we have only seen them when our parents and their parents get together.
  • Family D: My husband’s parents.
  • Family E: The parents of Family C.

So… Family A and Family B have met once or twice. Family C obviously knows Family D and Family E. We know everyone. But will they all find things to talk about? Will Family C feel awkward/left out? Will the Families of Parents feel like they are just there as add-ons? Will all our kids get along?

I am trying very hard to remember that MANY people are not as socially anxious as I am. And that Family A and Family B – at least – are super friendly and outgoing and can talk to anyone. And Family C is super nice and friendly, although I can’t speak to whether they are introverts or not.

The other thing I am trying to remember is that if I were the guest at a similar party, I would soothe my own anxiety by knowing I could just talk to my husband or play with my kid if it felt too awkward with the other adults. People DO this kind of thing all the time. They all said “yes!” when I invited them; they are grown ups; they know what they are getting into; EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

Once I have made it through this list, I loop back to whether the house is clean enough. We are having a cleaning person come Friday to clean, and that will take care of surface things like vacuuming and toilets and such. But then I think about things like, Oh no! Our baseboards are still green! And, The grout in our tile is horrendous! And, Why haven’t we hung up those six paintings on the wall yet? But am I going to paint the baseboards or clean the grout or magically hang a gallery wall of paintings in the next two days? No, no I am not.