Breaking the Word of Wisdom

We don't drink coffee or tea at our house. (Well, actually I take that back, we do drink herbal tea. My mom hasn't quite figured out the difference between that and other teas, so she just gives us any sort of tea she runs across and then acts put out when I tell her it's not the kind we can drink.)

One day we were at Maceys, which is a grocery store with a deli in it. The girls were probably 5 and 8 at the time. I needed to hurry and get us something to eat because we were running from one activity to the next and I wasn't going to have time to get us home for dinner before we needed to be somewhere else. I bought the girls some chicken legs to eat and paid for cups of water, which you needed to fill yourself at the soft drink area.

The water was located in with the Nestea. You just needed to push a little tab to get the water instead of the tea. I filled the cups and we sat down to eat. Later, Lexi (a.k.a. Ally) was still thirsty and wanted to fill her cup all by herself. It was in plain view, so I told her how to get it and kind of kept her in the corner of my eye until she came back.

As she walked back to Morgan and me, I noticed her licking her hand with a look of delight on her face. Then I looked at her cup and, sure enough, it was full of iced tea, not water. Morgan must have also put two and two together and figured out exactly what Lexi was ingesting.

As I was getting up to explain to the deli clerk what had happened, and pay for the iced tea if necessary, I heard Morgan shrieking, in a panic, "MOM, MOM, Lexi broke the word of wisdom!!!!! MOM, MOM, Lexi broke the word of wisdom!!!!"

Now the old Maceys, which we were in, had the deli right up front by all the registers. No lie, every head at every check stand turned in unison to see what all the fuss was about. It was so embarrassing! Morgan kept screaming and crying and carrying on.

She just kept screaming, "Mom, now what will we do, what will we do?" I practically had to shake her to get her to calm down. Finally I figured out that she thought Lexi would be seriously injured or even possibly die from that little taste of iced tea. I calmly and quietly explained to her that Lexi wouldn't suffer any permanent damage from a couple of licks of iced tea.

Once Morgan got it all sorted out in her head, I could see the little wheels turning in her head.

Less than a minute later, she turned to Lexi and said, "So Lexi, how does it taste?"

Lexi got a big grin on her face and rubbed her tummy and said, "MMMM, good!"

Then Morgan started in on me, "I want to taste the iced tea. I want to taste the iced tea."

I gave up on the idea of paying for it at that point and just dragged them both out of the store.