Supermarkets

Snippet on life in a supermarket with a toddler

Supermarkets

 

There is a chance that I could be writing this section too early. There is a chance that supermarkets could become even more interesting, however my instinct is telling this is the right. Before you have a child most people find supermarkets to be quite mundane, I don’t think many people look forward to doing the shopping likewise I don’t think many people dread it. I doubt a lot of people at the end of their day would ever come home with multiple stories of the supermarket, I doubt many people could confidently say that people they don’t even know are probably sat in their homes that evening, talking about what they saw your child do in the frozen food aisle that day.

 

I think this all changes when you have a child and I think with our little Reuben, for myself and Anna its changed a little bit more than average. See what is the image that conjures up into your head when you think of parents doing a shop with their children, that’s right it is of the parent pushing the child with them sat in the trolley. Sometimes that child is happy and they are playing little games with each other, sometimes that child is screaming at the top of their lungs to the point the milk aisle is going through one mass curdling. However, the norm is the child is sat in the trolley, meaning the parent can maneuverer about the supermarket where they want to and sometimes the child is asleep, almost hanging over the side and dribbling form the mouth, a close resemblance to how a very drunk adult looks slumped out on the last train home from Waterloo.

 

Reuben, noticed quite early on that being in the trolley was a huge contravention on his major life policy, that policy being “I’m in charge guys”. If you try and get Reuben to sit on those convenient little seats in the trolley, he does manoeuvres that resemble some Russian gymnasts floor routine, he is spinning and twisting everywhere. If you successfully force him into the trolley he will fight and jab you all the way to avoid being strapped in. If you manage to surpass his ridiculous toddler super strength and get him buckled in, he will pull so hard on the straps you worry that they are going to straight snap or that he is going to self-amputate his leg by shredding through them. He’s turned a shade of purple before he strains so hard to get out. So now, Anna & I have just given up beyond that initial lift up of seeing if he fancies going in, and he never does.

 

So that leaves us with a walking toddler, in a supermarket. Now you can pay good money to take children to these sensory rooms which are about the size of a downstairs toilet with a couple of cushions in. Reuben went to one once and slept through the whole thing. Why pay to go there when a Supermarket does the same thing but better? Soft background music, a Supermarket has got it, even better though is that music will come with updates about special offers for you to chase down to. Lots of colours, supermarkets deliver again, how many colours are in the fruit and veg section? Somewhere to lie down that is soft and squidgy, well of course just go find the bread aisle and let your toddler loose to tear up and chew through the cellophane packaging. Ok so maybe the bread aisle isn’t such a good idea, but it’s happened.

 

Genuinely though, if you’ve got time to kill then the supermarket is a great place for your child to learn. Reuben can actually help with the shopping. It’s great to say, go and get an Apple, see him stroll over to them and place one in the trolley. Go to the milk aisle and you can teach him Red, Green and Blue really easily. Whack him down the chocolate aisle and you can help him learn to count, 2 bars of chocolate, all the way up to 20 and you’ve got a great excuse for buying way more than you would otherwise be allowed then. You need chocolate when on Daddy Day-care though, I’ve not used up calories like this since I trained for the London Marathon.

 

For the supermarket visit with toddling toddler Reuben to be a success though you do need that grace of time I mentioned before, patience, and ideally about 6 pairs of eyes. As a parent you really do view the world quite differently. Take Double Cream for instance. Sainsbury’s tend to place is below the natural eye line near the bottom of their facing. The retailer in me sees this as a good idea, it’s not a regular purchase so you wouldn’t want to take up more premium eye level space with it as a consumer is unlikely to just think “Double Cream, yes I’ll have some of that”. They are much more likely to think “Apple Pie, yes let’s have some of that, and I’ll find some double cream to go with it”.

 

The parent in me sees this double cream sat down at the bottom of the facing and instantly thinks “Sainsbury’s you sodding morons , what the pissing Nora have you left that minefield of many catastrophes within reach of my nutjob of a son” and I’m obviously thinking this just as Reuben is reaching for a nice tub of double cream with a pose of “I wonder if I can play catch with this Dad?”. Not really the best situation to find yourself in. Why am I not already stood at the cream with him you many wonder, like a good parent would be yes? Well it’s like I’m trying to put back the yoghurts he’s just lobbed into the trolley because Sainsbury’s have quite cleverly also put Thomas the Tank engine yoghurts right in his reach too, also I note they are in the perfect eye line position for a toddler travelling in a seating position in a trolley, clever.

 

He’s pretty responsive to “nooooo put that back Reuben”, thing is he’ll put back the double cream he’s got and then just pick up another one, so he goes through each double cream one at a time. Say there is about 30 double creams, that’s quite a bit of time there, saying “no, put it back”. I have definitely noticed you need to be content with consistently repeating yourself as a parent, I deal with it by just thinking if you keep saying the same things over and over he’s going to learn them. He hasn’t quite learnt “Hurry up you bloody nightmare” yet though so maybe it isn’t working.

 

Anyways we finish with the double cream and the milk aisle is next. Reuben’s favourite aisle. I mean, milk is all he has ever known right, show this lad the milk aisle and you would think he’s popped a pill in a nightclub and is doing some weird kind of raving. He just runs up and down the 20 feet of different milk you can buy. That’s actually a point I’ll dwell on, why are there different varieties of milk? I mean who actually buys Cravendale? Anyways right now I am glad it is there as it offers more chances for me to teach Reuben Red, Green and Blue. Hang on though what’s this Orange one doing here? Orange Milk bottles, since when have they been around. Well it turns out that it is for 1% fat milk, otherwise known as watered down cow piss. It also transpires that this wasn’t actually allowed to be labelled as Milk originally because it fell out of the EU guidelines for butterfat content, but Britain lobbied against it and won, so it can now be incorrectly (in my opinion) labelled as Milk.

 

Similar to Cravendale the only grave of having Orange milk there is that it’s one more colour to teach the Champ. He’s legging it up and down, I’m trying to keep up although he moves so fast I do struggle to say Red before he’s at the green and vice versa. Then he stops at the blue milk. He knows, he knows this is his milk. He reaches out for a 4 Pinter. He always reaches out for a 4-pint bottle, but he can never even move it, it’s Daddy’s job to pick up the 4 pints. At least it was until he was 20 months old, now he is picking it up and carrying it to the trolley. Challenge is Daddy’s already put some in. So I take it off him and put it back. The expression on his face moves to one of, I would summarise as, total, unequivocal anger and he yells out a “Na” runs back and grabs it again.

 

Ok I think let’s play this smart, Daddy helps you put that in, then I’ll sly fully put the other one back. I do this and we are ready to move on, or so I thought we were. I’m heading off, Champ is now at the 2 pinters of blue milk and pulling one out. “We’ve already got blue milk mate, so put that back please” I say, “Na” he yells back. Passers-by refer to him as sweet for yelling “Na” at me. I’m not so aligned with this point of view currently as he lobs the 2 pints in. He’s not tall enough to place it in, so it is a genuine lob, right onto my nice pack of salt and vinegar crisps I was going to have with my lunch. I guess now they are in 3,000 bits they’ll last a bit longer anyway, not that Reuben allows me anytime to eat lunch though.

 

So we’ve got 6 pints of blue milk, it has a pretty decent shelf life so let’s not worry about it and move on. Only I turn around again to see he’s picked up the green milk. My initial reaction is “Hallelujah, GREEEEN MILK”. You see when Anna & I first moved into together into a flat in Woking, she was on Red milk, which is similar to watered down cow piss Orange Milk, and I was on Green milk, which is nearly as nice as the wonder that is whole Blue milk. As with all couples who are in their ‘honeymoon’ period we had an important issue to work through, would we go with the terrible red milk that basically made you feel like you’d taken your cereal into the shower with you by mistake when you were eating it, or would we settle on my lovely green milk, which makes the tea go a little creamy when you make a lovely cuppa after a hard day at the office.

 

Well after weighing up the pros and cons mentioned above, as you can probably tell we decided that the Red milk was the one to go for, as it was Anna’s preferred choice, and she was the boss. Yes. Goodbye Green milk, hello shower cereal.

 

Therefore, Reuben picking up green milk was no use to me whatsoever, he needs high fat content blue milk and I’m pretty sure Anna has programmed our fridge to have an alarm go off if Green milk ever goes near it. So I whip it off him and decide it is time to use my superior strength and carry him out of the aisle. So I pick him up, he knows what’s going on so decides to try and get out of my grip. I’ve got him under the arms so he knows he can’t go the easy way, being down. So he decides to climb over me, literally walk over me. He climbs up my chest, and over my face. I notice his shoes are quite muddy from all the football we’ve been playing just as the sole of one crashes into my eye. I’ve still got a grip on him, but he’s more in the position of a toddler lying on a hammock now, which doesn’t look very secure. Well let’s be honest it’s not that it just doesn’t look very secure, it isn’t very secure. So I go to use my superior strength and pull him in towards me.

 

It transpires this 20-month year olds legs have got a lot stronger, I can’t shift him. He finds this hilarious and starts cracking up, which brings attention towards us. Most of the time people smile at Reuben because of his gloriously blonde hair, not many people are smiling this time as they are clearly thinking, “that chap is going to drop his nipper onto the rock hard supermarket floor”. I’d never do that do that, I’d make sure I dropped him onto the double cream so he understands the level of mess he nearly makes every time he picks one up to throw it.

 

Reuben decides that to make this even funnier, it would be good to start pretending he’s riding a bicycle, onto my face. Yes, that’s right, my son who is supposedly my best mate, has decided it is funny to repeatedly pummel me in the face in a public place. The looks from people that were previously of slight concern for Reuben have now turned into those looks of total disgust. You know the type of look you get when you don’t have a hat on your child in December, even though it’s the mildest winter in record and most adults are strolling about in t-shirts.

 

 I eventually manage to pull off a move that must be logged in the Taekwondo archives and get him back on his feet, ‘win’ I think. With Reuben though in a supermarket if you get a win, he will instantly look to score right back at you. In this case Sainsbury’s have decided a great accompaniment to their promotion on steak, would be bottles of red wine and have stacked a load of them at the bottom of the aisle, about 20 feet from where we are, oh did I say we, I meant 20 feet from me and now 15, 14, 13 feet from the rapidly advancing Reuben.

 

You see Sainsbury’s, by stacking that wine in an incredibly intricate way, making it a little pyramid, it does capture the eye of adults and we may well do an impulse buy on it. It also looks like one amazing climbing frame to any toddler though, and my toddler has spotted it. Did I say you need 6 pair of eyes; you also clearly need about 8 pair of arms to get this stuff done. My knees might not be what they used to be, but I kick them into gear just in enough time to stop the wee man reaching the wine. As I grab him from behind his arms reach out for it as if pulling him away from it is the worst possible consequence on earth. Remember what I said about getting traits from his parents, he’s definitely learnt this wine one from Anna.

 

I’m briefly looking at the different types of rice puddings on offer when I hear a woman with a panicked voice call out “How is that Trolley moving!!? It is moving on its own!”.

 

I decide it’s time to brave the checkout, usually the toughest part. Reuben likes to help unpack the trolley though which is a good way of keeping him busy, so we set about doing that together. Six pints of milk, loaf of bread, yoghurts (not Thomas the tank engine), raspberries, Sauerkraut, Bananas. Hang on Sauerkraut? What’s that doing in there. Then I look again, powdered custard, hairbands, a miniature football. No wonder the little monkey was behaving so well; he’s done is own personal shop whilst I’ve been going through the list. Who does he think he is, he’s never worked a day in his life. I was half tempted to get out his Nationwide book and see if I could use that to pay for it separately. Instead I chose to explain to the checkout assistant the issue and that we didn’t need the items. Well apart from the powdered custard, that could actually come in useful.

 

So we head back to the car and drive home, I unload the shopping and bring Reuben into the kitchen. The boy wonder has such a good core that he genuinely helps me unpack the shopping, and he’s really good at it too he takes one item out at a time and passes it up to you. The only blip we have is when he goes to pass me a pear, then thinks he’ll have a bite out of it first. Well with the shopping all packed away I decide it is time for us to have a cup of tea and see what Peppa Pig has been up to so we chill out on the sofa, my best mate is cuddled up under my arm sucking his thumb, you would never know just 30 minutes’ prior he was cycling on my face.

Author's Note

Grammar being worked through