The Cookie Trick
We somehow end up at the grocery store every week during snack time- either mid-morning or soon after waking from our afternoon naps. Our grocery store has the bakery strategically placed as the first stop when you walk in. It used to be that I could bribe my children into staying in the wide-as-a-bus car cart the entire trip if I gave them each their own cookie. We normally don't get treats like this at home so an entire cookie is a huge deal.
No longer. Lately the cookies have been completely devoured and well on their way to digestion before we even finish with the produce section. This results in A) very hyper children, who B) do not want to be in the cart for longer than three minutes. A great combo- especially with twin two year olds.
Yesterday we were grocery shopping right around 5pm, the time the store begins to fill with people stopping in after work. It was busy. My children were amped up on M&M cookies and would not sit in the cart for anything. They despise being strapped in- even if it's a plastic yellow and green car cart.
For a few aisles they were content throwing my purchases into the cart for me. Then we reached the frozen foods. I think we opened every freezer and cooler door the store had before I turned around and realized that P had not just opened a freezer but was in the process of crawling in with the peas. Nice.
The next aisle had a great display of deodorant which my children were ripping the lids off of and pretending was hairspray- complete with sound effects. When I looked up and saw the babes 'hairspraying' their hair with Secret and making the sshhhing aerosol sounds as they did it I couldn't help but laugh. Laughing made trying to replace the products that had been ripped from their shelves near impossible. As soon as I got Fin's out of her hand, lid on and back on the display, Parker had grabbed another one. Then I would do the same for Parker and by that time Fin had another one. At this point other patrons were staring and I was belly laughing.
We escaped the deodarant and the next thing I knew Parker was dragging a bat and wiffle ball behind him as he perused the cheese section. Where he found this I haven't a clue and why my grocery store even sells these items is way beyond me.
After finally bribing them back into the cart by pretending it was a firetruck and then pushing it as fast as humanly possible, weaving through pokey shoppers, all the while making siren noises to ensure it's authenticity we arrived at the checkout. If you have ever pushed a car cart through a grocery store you know that it's steering capabilities are not that of a BMW and fitting through the tiny checkout lanes seems almost as if it's the final test for really stressed out and sweating at this point mothers. The other lovely thing about car carts is that the children sit directly at eye level to the candy and goodies on the opposite side of the conveyor belts. So by the time you have swiped your card and are ready to go you find that your daughter has eaten through the paper of a couple of Rolo packages and your son is happily drooling red Mentos spit down his chin.
This is all assuming they stay in the car cart during checkout (at this point you're asking yourself why doesn't she just buckle them in? Good question. This seems an obvious solution if, however, all three car carts at my grocery store didn't have broken seat belts.) Yesterday my children managed to escape the car/firetruck right at the point where I can't fit next to it to rescue them. So as I unloaded groceries behind the cart, my children played in the vacant checkout next to us. I couldn't move forward because a very not so nice man was in front of us pretending like he neither saw nor heard what was occurring two feet behind him. Just as I finished unloading the cart I heard my children over the loud speaker. I looked up to find them fighting over a telephone. The fight now being broadcast for all to hear.
I think the moral of the story is that the cookie trick no longer works in my favor.
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