Comedy Hour: Grocery Shopping

Let me set the scene for you:

We have four kids, so at this point, germs spontaneously generate from time to time in our household. Because we were getting over the latest round of colds/fevers, and because I'm a considerate human being, I hadn't taken my children out in public in many moons and the rations in the house began to dwindle. We needed to go shopping. I had no favors to cash in, so I decided to take the children by myself.

As I mentioned, we have four kids, so naturally I hadn't showered yet that day (it was only 4 PM). Maybe I didn't have makeup, and the only shoes I could find were old flip-flops, but I had sheer determination (and maybe a touch of desperation). After all, not one more PB&J or grilled cheese sandwich could be made if we ran out of bread, and then we should all starve.

I fed and burped the baby. I loaded up all the children. I remembered our reusable bags. By the time we arrived, no one was crying. So far, so good.

Now I love shopping at Winco for a lot of reasons, but unfortunately they have very few multi-kid carts. They're regular carts with big plastic seat monstrosities affixed to the back so you can load two kids on the plastic seats and one in the cart. They're essential for families with three or more small children, nice to have if you have two kids, and if you have only one child then you do not have the right to even look at them, let alone lay your hands on them. As we trailed our way to the entrance of the store, we saw one last big cart. And as Liam ran up to it with joy, a woman with a single child loaded up her perfectly-capable-of-walking eight-year-old and pushed it off. To that woman I'd like to say that Jesus is watching you. I think I remember Dante writing these sorts of people into one of the levels of Hell. Maybe.

So whatevs, I'm a professional. I can improvise. Firstly I wipe the living daylights out of a regular cart with sanitizing wipes. Then I put my infant, car seat and all, on the inside of the main basket. This means there is basically no room at all to put groceries, but I read an article once about how it's unsafe to precariously balance car seats on top of the seat portion of a grocery cart, so now I always put the car seat in the main basket 50% because I think it's safer and 50% because I don't want to have an argument with a stranger about how it's unsafe to have my baby up so high and how I'm a bad mother.

It's a crowded time to be shopping, but the kids are cheerful and boisterously helpful, which was nice. We even ran into my sister-in-law and her kids, which gave us some measure of courage. Michael was starting to fuss, but it was fairly low-level. I could handle it. I just needed to speed everything up and we needed to get out fast.

Unfortunately that's very difficult with children and impossible with the combination of children and crowds. I'd like to give a special shout-out to the lady who just stood in the middle of the aisle reading a sauce mix packet while we waited for about five minutes for her to move. Whatever she was looking for on the back of that packet- the answers to life's mysteries? A coded message from the NSA?- she was incredibly thorough and focused because she was definitely unmoved by the now-hysterically screaming baby just a foot from her and my increasingly piercing stare. When she finally looked up, she commented that I had lovely children, noticed that one of them was crying, and said, really, "You should really get him home!" Would that I could.

As we buzzed around the busy aisles, it was clear the two youngest boys had already mentally bailed on our group endeavor. Michael alternated screaming and spitting up on himself. Matthew from his perch in the cart seat tried to antagonize anyone within reach: touching things he'd been forbidden to touch, trying to order me around, kicking at his older siblings if they were too close. Liam sometimes rode on the front of the cart, but sporadically jumped off and danced up and down the aisles full of happy energy. Diana tried to compensate for her brothers by being over-helpful and trying to get all the groceries for me. We started to have to circle back to aisles to get items I'd missed. Liam announced half-distractedly that he had to go potty. We were beginning to falter.

But really the pinnacle of the whole affair came in aisle 17, the Mexican food aisle. Most grocery carts have a plastic cover over the metal handle and on this cover is printed the name of the store. Normally they're affixed to the handle with some sort of screws, but if those screws are removed, they rotate freely around the handle because they're just curved plastic. If you have the perfect storm of having the screws removed, having a two-year-old with fiddling fingers pry up the edge of the mostly rigid plastic cover, and having a three-year-old holding loosely to the cart with his finger in exactly the right place, what can happen is that the two-year-old moves his hand and allows the plastic to snap down on the three
-year-old's finger like a tiny guillotine and pinch so hard that it actually removes a chunk of skin from his thumb.

Yes, on one of the carts at Winco, we left a piece of my child's thumb. Blame the lady with one child.

We have always joked that we'll never lose Liam because we can hear him from a mile away. That's when he's happy. When he is sad or in pain, Liam naturally has volume equivalent to a tornado siren. Do I even look like I would make that up?

So to recap, our situation is as follows: one infant covered in his own spit-up and screaming at the top of his lungs, one three-year-old tornado siren holding a finger dripping blood, one two-year-old troublemaker kicking viciously at his siren-brother out of sheer spite and bad attitude, a five-year-old girl narrating the whole thing unfolding before my eyes and generally getting in the way of the other shoppers, and an unshowered mother fumbling for a band-aid in her purse next to the tortillas in aisle 17 at the busiest shopping time of the day GOD BLESS THEM ALL.

I got a band-aid on it. We practically ran to the check-out lines. I forgot like a third of the things on the list and at that point, I didn't even care because we were cutting and running. I was tempted to just grab the kids and leave the whole cart behind. At the car, I hand sanitizer-ed (I CAN MAKE IT A WORD IF I WANT TO) the heck out of everyone and threw crackers their way so I could finally feed the baby before his head exploded. Feeding him made him (and me) feel a little bit better, and he thanked me by choking a little bit and letting milk run down my front while he got his wits about him, then throwing up everything he'd just eaten all over the shoulder of my new nursing dress. Still, he seemed comforted somehow and I was all out of energy for caring. So we made it home and everyone was alive and we even had bread for sandwiches after it all, so I'm going to characterize that whole circus act as a success and FREAKING HEROIC to boot. You're welcome. Mothers of four or more children, you are superhuman.