Driving in Car(t)s with Kids

I imagine your household has the same setup as mine in the grocery arena...for the most part, you have one family member assigned to do the grocery shopping. In my experience it just works better that way. Whoever does the most cooking knows what they need, and they run to the store, be it once a week or several times, and gather the same general ingredients based on the family's preferences. So, in our household, the grocery/cooking person is usually me. When the "non-assigned" person (like Hero Guy) gets the groceries for some reason (I'm sick or otherwise occupied) they come home with all sorts of unusual products that looked really great on the TV commercial or sitting on the store shelf. Although he will have succeeded in spending the entire grocery budget, we have no real food. We'll have a couple of new varieties of cookies, chips, maybe even some health food item that looks like the weight loss miracle, but we'll have nothing to cook for dinner.

During this summer, I'm finding the same thing happens when I take Brainy Boy to the grocery store. During the school year, I generally grocery shop while the kids are in school, but summer presents another problem. It does give me a chance to talk about budgeting, healthy choices and other mom-type wisdom we want our kids to learn but the cart just ends up much fuller than usual. Today, in my usual grocery shopping style, we hit Walmart where we selected everything but our produce (because theirs is terrible in our neck of the woods). Since it is a Super Walmart, as long as Brainy Boy and Little Chic stay together, I'll let them browse the toy aisle together and then come find me in groceries when they are done. Following Walmart, we made the trek to a regular grocery store where the real magic happens.

Not only does it have great produce, but you can do your very own self-checkout. Little Chic begs me to let her go because she loves to do the scanning, the code look-ups on things without a bar code and bag the groceries. It is even more fun to insert the money or swipe the Visa Check Card through the machine when you are ready to pay. Little Chic is well-versed in all aspects of fruit/veggie selection and she works the scanner as well as the checkout girls so I decided with Brainy Boy there today, I'd have him take a more active part than hanging over the side of the cart with GameBoy in hand.

It did accomplish my mission of teaching him some lessons about selecting bananas, pears and apples, but it also complicated things a bit due to his penchant for tasting anything unusual. As we were selecting carrots, he spied the mushroom display. Not only did they have prepacked mushrooms, but they also had bulk ones that were unwrapped. After oohing and aaahing about each variety, he said what we really wanted was to bring home some truffles (those would be the really expensive mushrooms that look like dried dog doo). We settled for some baby Portobellos and went on down the aisle. As we were getting our pears, he got distracted over by the coconuts. He lamented the fact that he had never been able to taste a coconut and really, really wanted to try one. I described how in Florida, we had coconuts all the time, how I loved them and the puppy dog look in his eyes was too much--we stuck that in the cart too. Right next to the coconut was a pomegranate, which my kids had once after reading a part in the Bible about someone eating a pomegranate. Today, Brainy Boy remembered just how much he liked that pomegranate, and could we please have another one? In that went as well.

We were just about done with our five-minute-turned-half-hour shopping trip when we rounded the corner, and wah-lah. Can you imagine? We found these teeny-tiny, miniature clusters of grapes called Munchkins. It didn't matter that we already had regular grapes in our cart--the ones my kids usually turn up their noses at. These were, well, just scrumptious looking. They both assured me that they would definitely gobble a bunch of grapes if they were miniature. Each grape is about the size of a Tic-Tac.

So home we came and so far, we've sampled everything but the pomegranate and it was all just as delicious as predicted. The best thrill was getting to smash the shell of the coconut with a real live hammer. It is fun to have company on the usually mundane shopping trip, but it will be much quicker and less expensive once I'm flying solo in another week.