Grocery Shopping with Your Young Children

When I was young and child free, I loved to go shopping! Even as a young wife, I enjoyed grocery shopping, thinking how I would make loving meals for my new husband. But having young children made grocery shopping sheer torture. 

My husband with the three grocery-store monsters

The first thing you realize when shopping with young children is that it’s going to take twice as long as when you’re alone. One child will go one way; another child will disappear the other way and you’ll be looking for them—not shopping for what you came to buy.

Some mothers have admitted being tempted to pretend they don’t have any children until they’ve completed shopping. If they hear someone say, “Look at that awful child who knocked over the display,” and even though they know it is hers child, she’ll say, “Where on earth is his mother?” Then after her groceries are in the car, she sneaks back in the store and retrieves them.

However, abandoning your child can lead to disaster as one mother discovered when she found her daughter starting on the third of box of expensive Godiva chocolates (not to mention the doctor bill when the child was sick from eating so much). Another mother found her stray child crawling up the down elevator and causing all kinds of traffic problems. The possibilities are endless, but the least is that your child will pull everything off the shelves, and create chaos. So most mothers shop for a moment, retrieve a child, shop a little, retrieve another child, etc., ad nauseam.

Children love to race through stores, chasing each other, dodging other shoppers, and you can never keep up with them carrying the baby. Then you end up crashing into someone just as you are ready to grab the delinquents. You apologize profusely while the children race away. The baby loves the “race” (you walk fast, never run, but the baby gets bounced around anyway). When you finally catch the racers, you can either bribe them with a treat if they stay by your side, or threaten them if they don’t—whichever works best for you.

You must be careful to watch that they don’t throw everything in the cart—they will sneak in their favorite treats while their cohort detracts your attention. When you look down you will find all kinds of things you don’t allow in your house in your cart and two innocent looking children smiling. And of course they will have damaged them so you can’t put them back.

Even when you use shopping carts, this doesn’t solve a problem. Often putting all the small children in the shopping carts only centralizes the problem; the children stand up, lean over, or fall out of the cart. Right in the middle of checking the number of grams of fat, proteins and carbs in a food you are considering buying, you’ll hear a scream from someone and turn just in time to catch the baby in one hand as he falls out of the cart and the toddler in the other hand as the cart topples—without dropping the item. You also save the cart from hitting anyone or anything with your foot and make it look it look like a trick and not a disaster. (But look at what coordination you are developing--you could be training to be a gymnastic!)

But eventually you get all your acquisitions in your shopping cart, with the children, and pay for your purchases, looking fresh and cool as a Stepford Wife. If half of your items make it to the checkout in its original condition, consider yourself lucky. 

“Did you realize these sunglasses are broken, Ma’am?”

“Yes, my son stepped on them.”

“This birthday card is soiled. Do you want to get a new one?”

“No, my son stepped on that, also.”

“This magazine is all torn up, Ma’am. And it is about How to grow Orchids in Fiji. Surely. . . “

“My daughter destroyed it. Add it to my purchases. She can destroy the rest of it at home.”

“Oh, my goodness, Ma’am, this pie has something awful on top of it!”

“I know. My baby spit up on it. Luckily it is a type of pie we like and we can eat the rest of it.”

“Are you sure you want this bag of candy? It is half eaten and it is smeared with chocolate hand prints.”

“Yes, my oldest child did that.” 

Even though you pay for the damage, you wonder if you dare go back to that grocery store ever again. 

Or you could let your husband take them to the grocery store. Ha! As if that would happen! But what fun if it would be if he did!