Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Grocery Store

...is not my favorite place to go on a Saturday evening but sometimes ya gotta go! Tonight was one of those nights. I was out of laundry detergent and I needed to do laundry tonight and we were also out of apple juice w/calcium which is the only calcium That Other Kid gets, cuz he has tons of food allergies, including milk.....so we went to That Kid's hockey game, which we won! and HE SCORED!!!, then left him there to work a game and went to the grocery store. We had about an hour and 15 minutes, plenty of time for a quick trip, right?
Well I should know better after 4 years, that taking That Other Kid anywhere after 6 p.m. is a mistake of huge proportions, but I continue to do it....what is wrong with me??? We walk in and we're doing pretty good till we find the race car cart that he wanted, being driven another family. It went downhill from there.....I want that CAR, not THIS one.....this one is BAD....now granted 30 seconds earlier it was just fine, but not now. They had what he wanted!!! I moved on and got him distracted with something else, I don't remember what now, but anyway.....moving along I had a number of my purchases in the CAR/CART and decided to go down the cereal aisle that also has kids movies...no biggie! I happen to notice "Schoolhouse Rock" you know the ones that were on Saturday morning commercials way back when???? I LOVED those clips and got more out of those than all the grammar classes I ever had. I thought, cool I will buy this and I will hel my boys learn grammar the way I learned it!! But, I didn't realize it cost $16 and I'm cheap, so I put it back. In the meantime he sees movie after movie he is interested in....and starts THROWING A MAJOR TANTRUM!!!! I'm talking screaming I want that at the top of his LUNGS. I tell him HE WILL NOT get a movie if he doesn't stop throwing a fit! But no, he wants a movie, any movie, and doesn't stop screaming and crying....
So the remaining trip through the store is done while listening to a little boy screaming and crying....such a pleasant way to finish a long day, don'tcha think? By the time we were at the checkouts I was in a tizzy, and he was still screaming about the injustice of it all...the clerks just tried to get him interested in something else while ringing up my purchases as fast as possible.
I will never, never again criticize a mom and her brattylovely child in the grocery store again!!! So here's to all the moms I have criticized previously......I'M SORRY!!!! MAY GOD GIVE YOU A QUIET NIGHT!!!

2 comments:

Melissa Nelson said...

I just had a similar experience when my 5 year old lied to me about which shoes fit her feet. I told her forget it and we left the shoe dept. She screamed the rest of the way through the store! People kept looking at me as if I were clueless how to deal with children. I just blew it off as best I could but I really wanted to shout that I was doing the RIGHT thing and not giving in to the tantrum.

And I had the same realization, again, that I really shouldn't judge other moms and dads by the way their children behave in the store at a given moment. It's NOT the sum total of who they are.

Girl Raised in the South said...

I loved the apology at the end, aren't we all guilty of that one - judging from afar then we're in the thick of it ourselves. Good stuff.