Do You Have A Shopping Cart?

My youngest daughter, G, likes to sing made up songs. One of the cutest is the one titled "do you have a shopping cart?" I usually use one when I do grocery shopping with my girls. I find it makes the task easier, corrals them in one place, so to speak, if we could imagine two children as a herd of horses (not that hard really). However, on one recent occasion, the shopping cart was not enough to save me from the ORDEAL THAT IS SHOPPING WITH CHILDREN.

My first mistake might have been NOT promising candy as a bribe for good behaviour in the store. What was I thinking? Well, I guess I was thinking of my children's health, but I only needed about 10 items, so I thought nothing could really go wrong.

My second mistake was using the self-serve checkout. Now, I'm usually a pro at them and zip through in no time, but on this day I had decided to use my own bags, which I rarely do when I'm self-checkouting. All the other lines were long and I was desperate to finish the task since the two monkeys in my shopping cart were getting scrappy.

G was sitting in the child seat, R was hanging off the side. I was madly trying to self-check out items and get the machine to cooperate with my cloth bags. Scrappy monkey R, probably bored, was poking G for entertainment, who responded with swats and pushes. While my back was turned toward the machine, I could hear that things were starting to get pretty rough, so I turned around.

I was just in time to watch the whole shopping cart fall right over. That's right. With my child hanging on to the side. With my youngest strapped in the seat. With the shopping cart landing right on top of my horrified oldest child.

I do not recall what it was exactly that I yelled out, but it was something along the lines of "OH MY GOD!" Both children were crying very hard. EVERYONE was staring. By some miracle, neither of them was really hurt. A kind grocery store employee let me sit on a bench and sooth them while she rang the rest of the purchases through. Where would I be without the kindness of strangers? Probably a crazy woman pushing a shopping cart. Oh wait....