A Glimpse

Yesterday I took the two little boys with me to the grocery store. Benjamin was playing at a friend's house, so I mercifully only had to take the little two. About a half mile down the road, I realized that I'd forgotten Jacob's shoes. You may wonder why he didn't have them on before getting in the car, and the answer is that he just takes them off once in the car and chews on his socks. I thought about going back for them, but I decided against it since last week at the store he just took both them and his socks off and threw them out of the cart (I probably wouldn't have even noticed if the wheel hadn't gotten stuck on one of the shoes. Luckily, both shoes were recovered, but the socks were a loss). Anyway, the rest of the way to the store I pondered how I was going to get my shoeless Jacob and Ty both into the store. I realized that I had two options. #1-- Find a car cart (you know, the big ones with a little car on the front for kids to "drive"-- it's my only option when I have both Jacob and Ty with me) in the parking lot and park close to it so I could put Jacob right in. #2-- Carry my 40 lb. Jacob and 20 lb. Ty both into the store at the same time. I'm not extactly Hercules, so let's just say that all the way to the store I was praying that we'd find a car cart in the parking lot. The last cart corral I checked in the parking lot had a car cart in it, so I sent a quick "thank you" heaven-ward and triumphantly loaded Jacob into it. My triumph didn't last long, though, because soon I saw that all the infant seat belts had been cut out. I looked around for another car cart, but there were none to be found, so I girded up my loins and set out to get the groceries.

Ty only made it to the second isle before he decided that sitting tamely is for wimps and that he prefers going surfer-style. I stopped to try to reason with him, but neither snacks nor toys could persuade him to stay sitting down. Jacob started to get mad because his car wasn't going, so I handed him a book, put Ty on my hip, and tried to navigate our bus of a cart with only one hand. Then Jacob decided he was tired of his book, so he threw it out.

What seemed like ages later, we finally had all necessary groceries in the cart, and I pulled into the line for the cashier. Jacob was within arm's reach of all the candy (why do they have to put it there anyway???), so I was nervous, but fortunately the plastic coily thing that they use to rope off isles was also hanging there at his eye-level, and he attacked it instead. With Jacob chewing happily on the store's plastic coil, I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to put Ty back into the cart. No go-- surfer boy was still firmly entrenched in his desires. I put him in the back of the cart with the groceries which he promptly started climbing to try to get out. It was a race between us to see if I could get all of the groceries out of the cart before he used them as steps to get out. The lady in line in front of us was staring, but I deliberately avoided eye contact.

Finally the circus came to an end, and when the bagger asked if I wanted some help getting out, for a half of a second I thought about saying yes and handing Ty to him, but I took a deep breath and said, "No thanks. I can manage." For I am Supermom!