The Grocery Store Diaries 8

Dirty looks: None
“You’ve got your hands full: None
Almost made it out with nothing, BUT then the cashier and the bagger both told me they were never having kids of their own.


A couple of new things have happened lately as we make our weekly trip to the grocery store. It always involves verbal skills. All three of my kids talk too much. The middle one always has. That is his purpose in this world, to talk his way out of anything. The baby talks too much. We haven’t had any speech red flags with him, if he wakes up in the middle of the night he talks to his stuffed animals. Even the one with the speech delay doesn’t keep her opinion to herself anymore. Where did they get this from? All this blabbing and blabbing like someone cares? Perhaps their dad…..

The baby is at the age where he is picking up nouns. He practices them at the grocery store. We are doing the grocery store thing, putting food in our cart, and as other customers go by, he will point at what they have and scream words such as “COOKIE!” “APPLE!” “NANA!” “MILK!” and try to climb out of our cart to get to what they have. I should be grateful he isn’t screaming “BEER!” “DORITOS!” “COCA-COLA!” or even “CHICKEN NUGGETS!”

The girl has decided that it isn’t enough to tell me what to put in the cart, but we have to tell other people what they should or should not have. As we were checking out, she starts pulling on me going “Mommy! Look at that man!” I cringe when she starts this, because I don’t know what the hell she is about to tell me. Before I can cut her off she says, “He is getting Cheerios just like us!” Sigh of relief, but then she doesn’t stop and adds, “But he doesn’t have 2% milk.” I must return to the cringe. It is none of her business if he prefers whole milk or even rice or soy for all I care, but again, it could be worse.

And rounding off my not so sexy threesome, the middle child must question the world. Who to blame this on? The Montessori Method? His scientist father? Sid the Science Kid? Your guess is as good as mine. But we can’t just put “crackers” in the cart. As we go down the cracker aisle, he wants to know what makes each cracker different. These have salt, these are wheat. These taste like gluten free cardboard. You can make this a game. Find the circles, find the rectangles, find the ones a "certain friend" of mommy's wouldn’t let her son touch with a ten foot cattle prod. Actually, he would not be allowed to touch the prod either. We finally decide on the crackers shaped like goldfish. You can’t get enough goldfish crackers. But then you have to decide if you want regular, pretzel, or pizza flavor.

He does this all over the store.

Here is a conversation we had about yogurt:

“I want vanilla.”
“I know that, I put it in the cart.”
“No, you put in the red cartons and I want the blue ones.”
“Honey, vanilla is vanilla.”
“No mom, look, the blue carton is better.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do, I want blue vanilla yogurt, trust me.”

I switch the primary colors just so I can get out of the store before he decides that the green bell peppers should be red. The blue cartons were on sale five for three dollars; maybe he knew that…..

I hate to compare my four year old to Sascha Baron Cohen, but Borat actually has a deleted scene that explains this argumentative grocery nature. Watch it here. And no warnings are needed because it is not inappropriate. In fact, it makes me kind of mad that comedians can be just as funny and keep their personalities without being disgustingly graphic if they want to. Sascha definitely channeled a four year old for that scene, and that employee had a lot more patience than I do on any given day!

Yes, in America, we have so many choices it is ridiculous. It gives my munchkins something to talk about. And moi? Something to write about later.