The Pioneer Woman Part II

Get ready for more pictures of us waiting in line. I must admit the whole experience traumatized me a little. By the time we got up to the table to have our books signed I had left the line three times to feed and change Micah, I was shaky from only eating NutrGrain bars and an Orange Julius in a nearly five hour time span and covered from head to toe in spit-up. Poor little Micah man, he did not sign up for this! As a result, I am having a really hard time sticking to my blog-a-day commitment. You will have to forgive me while I attempt to get back on track.

Alright, here we go with the second instalment of our PW adventure!

Here is Micah at the beginning of the day, little does he know what lies ahead! Like I promised before, many exciting things happened in line. First, we met the two men standing behind us. One was there to get a book signed for his mother in law in hopes of becoming the best son in law in the world. They were in town from Seattle for the Vikings game the next day. Poor guys, not only did they wait in line for five hours to meet someone they had not heard of before Saturday, the Vikings spanked Seattle this afternoon. Sorry guys!

During the course of the day we discovered that TLC was filming a reality show: Mall Cops: Mall of America. It was so funny! There was a small army of security guards keeping the "rowdy" crowd under control. Periodically two of the men and the one woman would stand in a semi-circle and talk while a camera guy stood right up in their face, a man held a mic boom over their heads and a woman with a stack of papers looked on. I overheard them asking a group of people how long they had been waiting in line. The answered: Oh, a couple of hours. That is not what the camera guy was looking for, he asked them if they could say: We have been waiting for ____ hours! Then the group of three guards would get together and talk again. I don't know much about the job of a mall cop but it seemed like they were spending a lot of time huddled up talking amongst themselves.

And now the best story of the day! At one point I left to nurse Micah and when I came back to join the other girls I sat down to wait for them to catch up to where I was. A nice woman sat down next to me with her baby and two little girls. The girls had to run around a little I am sure and she was tired of holding the baby and keeping track of the toddlers. Her group passed by before my friends came so she got up and left. I noticed a little later that there was a bag on the bench where she had been sitting. Why I didn't just stand up and ask if it were hers I don't know. I justified it by thinking that maybe it had been there the whole day and it was not even hers. Sometimes I kick myself for being so socially challenged, or maybe that is just an excuse.

Here is a picture of the woman, she is in the blue/grey shirt looking down at her stroller.

Eventually the line wound back past the bench and someone noticed the bag. People started asking if anyone knew who's it was. I told Rachel to ask the girl that had been sitting by me. She did and it was hers. Rachel went to pick it up for her and a guard shoved her back into line yelling at her to stay away from the bag! Then the blocked off the hallway from both directions, told us to all step back and asked people to not take pictures. A man came out with some kind of scanner and waved it over the bag, then a dog came out and sniffed it. When the decided there was no bomb in it, one guy opened it up to go through the contents. The woman kept saying, it was her bag and it had her cloth diapers in it.

After they went through it they had to interview the woman to make sure it was hers and she was not going to cause any trouble. I hope she had a dirty diaper in there that they had to pull out and look at. It's just sad that they have to take such extreme precautions for a forgotten diaper bag. We decided they made as big of a deal as they could for the benefit of the camera crew, it will make an interesting story for the show!

On to a couple more pictures from waiting in line. Rachel's baby is not much for cuddling so she took advantage of Micah while she could.

Wait, what do we have here? Apparently he is concerned around strangers and has decided that he needs to stick close to Mama. She is not complaining!

We got the nice men behind us to take a group picture. Look, Micah is even looking at the camera!

Stay tuned, Marlboro Man, Pioneer Woman and two punks!