My Cool Parenting Badge

I believe that Parenthood should follow the lead of Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts of America and offer various badges for skills learned.

For example, there would be the obvious badge for bringing the child into one's family through birth/adoption/alien abduction.

There would be the badge for successfully navigating the tumultuous teenage years without selling your child off to gypsies or chaining them in the basement until their 19th birthday.

Today I would have earned a badge for my Parenthood sash, the one titled "Grocery Shopping at Wal-Mart with your Children."

Ugh.

Due to the fact that we were gone this past holiday weekend and because we are focusing on saving our pennies, I found myself at 9:30am grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with two small children. Seriously, there are few worse experiences out there for any mom than to take her children on her long grocery run. You can see the pain in the other mothers' faces as you pass them on aisle seven, each of you pushing carts overrun with food and children, attempting to hold onto your sanity just a few minutes longer.

Normally, I love grocery shopping, mainly because it combines two of my favorite things: food and shopping. Most weeks, I do not take the children with me when I hit the food store. Either I go alone or our entire family of four tackles the shopping as a team. However, we were looking at having a lunch of a can of Great Northern Beans and watered down Ketchup if no grocery shopping occurred before noon. Summoning up my best attempt at a positive attitude, I loaded the kids into the car and off we went to Wal-Mart.

Let me provide a quick glimpse of how our hour went in this store:

*Upon entering the store, I realized that Evelyn only had on one sandal. This prompted a trek back out to the car, retracing our steps, in search of the missing shoe. I later discovered it was in her hand. Did I mention it is no less than 122 degrees today?

*I left half of our snack supply at home on the kitchen counter (Tip: Always have food on hand when shopping with children. It entertains them.) and had to ration out a tiny box of raisins and a half-eaten package of fruit snacks between the two. I later found a blue fruit snack stuck in E.'s belly-button, which I am not quite sure how it ended up there considering she was wearing a one-piece romper.

*Evelyn ate a portion of my grocery list.

*Isaac (who was riding in the back of the cart at the time) managed to somehow sit on the block of Pepper Jack cheese for the majority of the time he was in the cart. I am not sure how it will ever be the same.

*After Isaac was removed from the back of the cart and allowed to walk, he was given the task of holding the large container of fresh blueberries while I reorganized our cart. He then felt the need to put the container of berries into the cart by slam-dunking them into the back. Blueberries went everywhere. While I was attempting to clean them up and simultaneously stop Isaac from stepping on them, I heard a page for an associate to go to the fruit department for a clean-up. Yeah, that was us that required a page to be sent out.

*The not-so-fun game of "Throw the box of crackers back and forth to each other" was invented. The throwing occurred between Isaac and Evelyn and I chose to pretend it was not happening to buy a few minutes of peaceful shopping. The game came to a sudden halt when E.'s throw shot the box out of the cart and managed to hit a man on the leg. He laughed tensely as he handed the cracker box back to us, clearly not amused.

*The check-out lady did not comprehend the concept of reusable grocery bags and was uncertain that she would be able to put my purchases in the bags I had brought. After I pointed out that Wal-Mart was also selling such bags (mine are from Target) and were located at her check-out lane, she reluctantly agreed to put the things I paid money for in the bags.

All of this to say that I have decided to fashion myself a sash and am going to start hot gluing on my own personal parenting badges.

What badges would you put on your parenting sash?

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Here are a few pictures from our weekend:

Brother sharing his ice cream with Sister.

Getting all of his ice cream out of the bowl

Tobe's Granny and E.

Two children who like to torment their parents by never looking at the camera at the same time

Tobe and Isaac preparing to shoot off fireworks at Tobe's Grandparents farm

Isaac running as fast as his little legs can carry him AWAY from the fireworks. This was hysterical. I have a video of his reaction to some fireworks, which is priceless. He wasn't a big fan of the noise.