They are like gold.

Around our house there is a great love of Yoo-Hoo. Specifically, the drink boxes. And when I say great love, I mean undying devotion to those precious little drink boxes.

So imagine our disappointment when we were unable to locate the drink boxes in any of our grocery stores. And by disappointment, I mean earth shattering woe. The kind of woe that has us dropping to our knees in the middle of the grocery store and wailing "NNNNOOOOOOOO!" That, my friends, is what happened to us. (Well, maybe we didn't drop to our knees, but I distinctly remember saying the NNNOOOOO part.)

Let me give you a little background. My son, my darling little bundle of neuroses, will not drink milk. Unless it's the chocolate milk he gets when he buys lunch, and then he only drinks a little tiny bit of it. But otherwise, the mere site of milk will send him into the bathroom to pay homage to the porcelain god, if you know what I mean. So when I grew tired of constantly feeding him calcium fortified juice (you should see what all that juice did to his bowels, it was not pretty) I sought out something to give him that would fortify his bones and keep him from snapping in two when I hugged him. Imagine my shock when I presented him with a Yoo-Hoo drink box, and he liked it. Loved it. And drank all of it down without even questioning it's ingredients. (Shhh, don't tell him it's milk in there!)

From then on I bought the drink boxes by the cart load.

And then, then, the grocery store was out of them.

No problem, I thought, I'll just go to another store. They were out too. I started to panic. But school had just started, so I figured other parents were buying out the supply. Don't worry, I told myself, they will get more in stock soon. Really soon, I hoped, because I only had one 10 pack left.

But (you knew the but was coming! I'm not very sly in my storytelling) they did not reappear in the grocery stores. Any of them.

In a moment of desperation, we bought a case of Yoo-Hoo in the cans. And that was quickly rejected by my son. (My daughter, on the other hand, liked it fine.) Instead, I bought calcium fortified orange juice for my son and tried not to think about what all that vitamin C would do to his bowels. (Did I mention it is not pretty?)

When we went to visit my husband's family in a town about 45 minutes away, we made a quick side trip into a grocery store and found four 10 packs of Yoo-Hoo drink boxes. It was all they had left on the shelf, and we bought them, hurriedly. We zoomed out of the store, giddy with the fact that we had the drink boxes! Enough to last a couple of weeks! And Ah-Ha (!) we knew where to find more! We are so smart!

The smart-ness, it did not last. Because when we were running out of drink boxes yet again and our stores still didn't have any in stock we went back to the other town. And they were out too. All of the stores. Completely out. [Cue earth shattering woe.]

We were out of drink boxes for weeks and the children were drinking lots of OJ. And life was very, very sad. My son would ask for his drink boxes, even go to the cabinet to retrieve one (he doesn't like them cold - odd, I know) and he would be sorely disappointed to see the shelf full of OJ. So sad.

Then, then, my husband had to go out of town for the day on Friday. While he was there, he went into a grocery store. And lo and behold, they had the drink boxes! So he bought 60 of them! Because we were beginning to think we would never see their loveliness again. And you should have seen the looks of joy and excitement on the children's faces when he showed up with packs and packs of drink boxes. It was a moment for us, I tell you.

And on Sunday when we went to buy some pastrami, swiss cheese and rye for yummy, yummy sandwiches, what did we see on the store shelves? Yoo-Hoo drink boxes! But not a lot. So I bought 4 more packs. Just in case they try to deny us again. And today I'm hoping to buy some more after I take the little ones to the library.

So we now have a stockpile of Yoo-Hoo. We have a cabinet full of the drink boxes, and 3 cases of the cans in our pantry. So, you know, if you ever need any....

Don't come asking for some here. We don't have enough to share.