"Yay! Mom's making tacos for dinner!"

WHOA!!!! Hold on there kids - dinner's not quite ready. I just need to take the taco shells out of the box. You know - the ones we bought at the grocery store today?

What the... ??? This is what I found when I opened the package:


In case you can't tell what you're looking at, here's a closer look:
I don't think there was a single taco shell that was in fewer than 3 pieces. I estimate that most of the shells were actually closer to the 10-50 piece range.

You can undertand my confusion, I'm sure. I mean look here:

I assumed this meant 12 taco shells, which we could then put our taco ingredients into. It does kind of look that way from the picture displayed on the box:

What you can't tell from that picture is that what's really inside the box are simply
Lots and lots of pieces of shells.

I should have suspected something was up when the true highlight of the photo on the package was this:


Thankfully, the kids rolled with it well, and enjoyed dipping the taco shell bits into their blackbeans and cheese. The grown-ups improvised by having taco salad, which was actually quite good, just not what was on the menu.

I learned from this that I do not handle unexpected events very well, particularly if they appear to be designed by some higher power that is having a laugh at my expense. I seem to be getting worked up more often as I'm getting older, over really lame stuff that shouldn't be a big deal - stuff like an entire box full of broken taco shells. Again, as is usually the case, the husband finds this quite amusing. Whatever.