I know, I know. I am probably supposed to hate WalMart. For the life of me, I don’t know why though. There are all sorts of claims about how bad WalMart is and I think that I have read or been told them all. However, I don’t think those claims hold water any better than WalMart’s little blue smiley face bags would. That really isn’t the point of my post though. For the record, I think that WalMart is far, far more responsible than Sears was during its heyday of the 50s and 60s. But I digress … this post isn’t about that.

Our family has quite a relationship with WalMart. If you’re raising a family today, and you’re anywhere near one of their stores (and who isn’t it?), you’re going to have a relationship with them. We pretty much buy everything there … as a matter of fact, except for a few online retailers we buy from, we pretty much could exist never going into any store except WalMart.

I guess it makes sense, then, that two of our most momentous family occasions occurred there. Let me explain …

We had fears that we’d never get our son potty trained. Even at that young age, he didn’t like to try new things. That continues today at his ripe old age of almost eight, much to Lisa and my’s chagrin. (Is “my’s” a word? I never know how to say that … pretty bad for a Communications major … but that brings up memories of my college class in English Grammar … I’d prefer to not go there right now so, moving along…) Now, where was I? Oh yeah, potty training … finally, when he was turning three, we developed a really neat and possibly patentable system (aka bribery with Hot Wheels) that worked and, actually, he trained pretty easily once our system was employed.

I think we only had one wet bed and one daytime “accident” that amounted to anything during that period … and that is where WalMart comes in. We were shopping there one evening and we had brought Evan with us. He was wearing shorts and underwear … no pull-up. Of course, as we made our way through those hallowed aisleways of falling prices, we were asking him every ten seconds “Do you have to go, do you have to go?” (Something which undoubtedly just started his kidneys pushing whenever we made him think about it.) He insisted he was fine … and everything was indeed fine … until we got to Housewares.

Lisa was looking at something and Evan and I were standing there. He never said a word, never made a face, never gave any indication but, when we started walking again, I looked down and there, left behind in the Housewares department, was a nice little puddle of pee. You know, now, that is a little bit of a predicament. What do you do? Pick up a phone and announce “Code ICUP in Housewares. Code ICUP in housewares”? Right or wrong, we justified that it was a very small puddle (which it was) and kept on walking.

Now, as I said earlier, we have had two momentous family occasions at Wal Mart. The second one actually happened at the WalMart in Honolulu. Evan was six. Now, let me preface this by saying that our family really doesn’t throw up very much. We have some friends who, as the Dad of the family tells me, throw up a lot. He has told me that there’s never a week that goes by that they don’t have at least a couple of such events. He was pretty shocked when I told him about our family’s very low ROTU (Rate of Throw Up).

But, alas, this subject must have something to do with WalMart or I would not have brought it up. We were in the shoe department when we noticed Evan looking a little, shall I say, green around the gills. We have fortunately not seen it very much over the years but we know when he has “that look” so we headed for the cash registers to hopefully get out of the store and to our hotel. Well, needless to say, we didn’t quite make it out of the store without having an incident involving one of WalMart’s floors again. This was not one we could just walk hurriedly away from unfortunately. It was much larger and more, shall I say, "gloppy" than the pee puddle.

The good folks at WalMart were amazingly nice about it and friendly though – even the bucket and mop guy. You have to love people who can be nice even in the midst of a six-year-old’s vomit.

Yep, our family has a relationship with WalMart. They've become like family. We couldn’t live without them I don’t think.