Grocery Store = Seventh Level of Hell
Every week, the grocery shopping gets a little more nightmarish because of course I have to take the short one along. I look forward to it about like cancer patients look forward to chemotherapy. So it was with much dread and trepidation yesterday that I picked her up from daycare and headed to Ye Olde SuperWalmart. In addition to groceries we also needed a life jacket for A and some other stuff.
The excursion started off innocently enough with the nice lady handing the nice toddler a nice yellow sticker. The kid stuck it on me and pulled it off a few times, and finally left it on my right boob.
The trip went downhill from there. Eventually the cart fills up and that causes a problem because it means that she can turn around and reach stuff. I bribed her with some fruit snacks that I had brought along in my purse. She shoved them all in her mouth at once and resumed the manipulation and torture. She saw a small Dora ball and asked for it so in a momentary lapse of reason I gave it to her. It seemed preferable to having to hear "BALLLLLLLLLL! DURA!!!!!!" for the next half hour. Then of course she threw the ball. "Mama, wanna catch it?" I had to retrieve it from beneath a Mountain Dew display, then a salsa display, and so on it went.
I said this about a hundred times: "Knock it off or you are going in time-out. I'm not kidding." You can imagine how effective that was. I whipped through the store as fast as I could but I had to make some concerted attempt to get the stuff I came for, LEST I FORGET SOMETHING AND HAVE TO DO IT ALL AGAIN. I decided to bake some cookies for Father's Day so I tossed the needed ingredients into the cart. Meanwhile I had to keep shuffling everything around in the cart to keep her from ripping open the packages. After a while I started to wonder why the floor seemed so grainy and slippery. Then I looked down and saw that our bag of sugar had been pierced somehow. We left a sugar trail all the way down the aisle, and you could see a little mound of it each time I had stopped the cart for a few seconds. I was trying to deal with the sugar situation while A was standing in the cart yelling, "OUUUUUUUUT! Wanna get down!" I threatened time-out again because you know how effective it was the first hundred times.
Soon she was in full-blown tantrum mode. A lady came up to her and said that such a pretty girl with such pretty curly hair shouldn't be crying. I smiled tightly. I begged A to hang in there long enough for me to grab some bananas and get out of there. The snot was flowing freely by this time. She began grabbing frozen food from the cart and stacking it precariously. I picked them up off the floor and momentarily thought of curling up in a fetal position over by the ice cream.
After that she set her sights on ripping open a box of sandwich bags because she was convinced that there were fruit snacks inside (what can I say, she can't read yet!)
Somehow we paid and made it out the door. Or almost. Then I heard a man yelling, "MA'AM, YOU DROPPED YOUR POP!" I am not from the Midwest originally and the pop thing always gets me. My what? Ohhhhh. Somehow an entire case of Pepsi had fallen off my cart and I hadn't even noticed.
We finally made it home about an hour and a half after we started. I had the groceries we needed, but my soul had died just a little.
The excursion started off innocently enough with the nice lady handing the nice toddler a nice yellow sticker. The kid stuck it on me and pulled it off a few times, and finally left it on my right boob.
The trip went downhill from there. Eventually the cart fills up and that causes a problem because it means that she can turn around and reach stuff. I bribed her with some fruit snacks that I had brought along in my purse. She shoved them all in her mouth at once and resumed the manipulation and torture. She saw a small Dora ball and asked for it so in a momentary lapse of reason I gave it to her. It seemed preferable to having to hear "BALLLLLLLLLL! DURA!!!!!!" for the next half hour. Then of course she threw the ball. "Mama, wanna catch it?" I had to retrieve it from beneath a Mountain Dew display, then a salsa display, and so on it went.
I said this about a hundred times: "Knock it off or you are going in time-out. I'm not kidding." You can imagine how effective that was. I whipped through the store as fast as I could but I had to make some concerted attempt to get the stuff I came for, LEST I FORGET SOMETHING AND HAVE TO DO IT ALL AGAIN. I decided to bake some cookies for Father's Day so I tossed the needed ingredients into the cart. Meanwhile I had to keep shuffling everything around in the cart to keep her from ripping open the packages. After a while I started to wonder why the floor seemed so grainy and slippery. Then I looked down and saw that our bag of sugar had been pierced somehow. We left a sugar trail all the way down the aisle, and you could see a little mound of it each time I had stopped the cart for a few seconds. I was trying to deal with the sugar situation while A was standing in the cart yelling, "OUUUUUUUUT! Wanna get down!" I threatened time-out again because you know how effective it was the first hundred times.
Soon she was in full-blown tantrum mode. A lady came up to her and said that such a pretty girl with such pretty curly hair shouldn't be crying. I smiled tightly. I begged A to hang in there long enough for me to grab some bananas and get out of there. The snot was flowing freely by this time. She began grabbing frozen food from the cart and stacking it precariously. I picked them up off the floor and momentarily thought of curling up in a fetal position over by the ice cream.
After that she set her sights on ripping open a box of sandwich bags because she was convinced that there were fruit snacks inside (what can I say, she can't read yet!)
Somehow we paid and made it out the door. Or almost. Then I heard a man yelling, "MA'AM, YOU DROPPED YOUR POP!" I am not from the Midwest originally and the pop thing always gets me. My what? Ohhhhh. Somehow an entire case of Pepsi had fallen off my cart and I hadn't even noticed.
We finally made it home about an hour and a half after we started. I had the groceries we needed, but my soul had died just a little.
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