The Grocery Store Diaries 3

Dirty Looks: 2, possibly 3, might just have been his face
“You’ve got your hands full”: 0 (didn’t have the baby with me)
Damage: One box of blueberries on the floor


By now no one is confusing these with the Red Shoe Diaries so don’t bother looking for David Duchovny. I had to write that in the spirit of the new season of Californication. This is how something weekly and ordinary can become extraordinary, at least in my world.

It was a beautiful day in our neighborhood and I decided that since Daddy was home and the baby was napping that the older two and I could go up to the green and we could stop in at the little “Guilford Food Center” for a few things I forgot at the Big Y. Yep.

The ride was fine, they know the rules now. Actually, Kenneth rides his bike and Frances skips beside him. She still doesn’t have quite the coordination to peddle for that long of a distance but she is happy enough in herself to skip along with her brother. Neither of them seems to notice that one can do more than the other. When they are together, they just “are.” I hope Frances and Kenneth always have that relationship. They both stop at every street and look both ways and wait for mommy. This is due to Barney and his annoying songs, not any good mothering on my part.

Kenneth parks his bike outside the store, and then the real fun begins. The aisles are tiny and the food is fresh, but they do have some general staples for the few people like me who don’t make a grocery list like they should and have to grab a couple of things they forgot.

My son goes running to the baking aisle for his volcano ingredients. He is really interested in volcanoes right now, so I constantly have to re-stock the pantry with vinegar and baking soda (I just learned from a friend that I can always dump the left over down the drains, by the way). We have plenty of food coloring, so I don’t have to worry about that this time, but I get to the baking aisle and they don’t just have “vinegar.” They have at least ten different specialty gourmet organic vinegars ranging in price from 7-11 bucks. Do I want to put that much into my son’s little science project? Then he looks at me sweetly and reminds me that it is magma when it is just baking soda and food coloring and we have to add the vinegar and then it becomes lava because it is out of the Earth. So we decide that the red wine vinegar might just do the trick. It might even be better than generic Big Y vinegar. He is so excited about setting off his volcano. Any day now it is going to fall apart and I will have to spend an afternoon making a new one. I am trying to talk him into a volcano birthday party because that would make me so much cooler of a mother than a Spiderman one.

In the mean time, Frances has meandered over to the fruit section. They have everything fresh and available for little hands to grab and I hope I stopped her before she took a bite out of an apple and put it back, I looked but I didn’t see any. She begs me for strawberries, but they were looking a little too fuzzy, so I bargained her into blueberries, which fell on the floor.

As we head to the little check out area, Kenneth starts to scream, “Don’t forget Daddy’s Diet Coke! You know how he is without Diet Coke!” Yes, we all know how Daddy is without his coke, and now so does the rest of the store.

As we are leaving a pretty teenager tells Frances she had to wear an eye patch when she was a little girl too, but they didn’t have the cool purple ones when she was small. This makes my child’s day!

We wander home through the green, say hello to the Civil War statue that I have accepted is a Union member, and my cell phone isn’t ringing, so I know that the baby is asleep and all is well.

A trip to the small store with only a few little setbacks.

I have some nice days all things considered…