I am a stay at home mother. I do all the stay at home Mom stuff. All the "woman" stuff.(I know, I know...that is sexist, and men can and do a lot of this stuff all the time, this isn't about equality of the sexes or anything like that...) I cook, I clean, I chauffeur people hither and yon, I take the dogs to the vet, I am nice to the neighbors and the parents at the school. I am the friggin PTA president for pete's sake. However, I have a secret. I would rather do anything ...ANYTHING than go grocery shopping. And yet, and yet, and YET I end up doing just that several times a week.

Why? Because my family requires food. And my husband won't allow us to eat out for every single meal. He is tyrannical that way.

Why do I hate it so much? Well, I hate it because it is a tiresome horrid thing to have to do. Walk up and down aisles filled with crappy food and put things into my basket one by one. Knowing full well that most of it will probably go to waste, since my children don't eat. They subsist on peanut butter and bread. My husband will eat ANYTHING except eggs. I could buy nothing but canned crappy chili and he would be happy as a clam.

I have to pay way too much for this horrid crap they call foodstuffs. I usually don't see anything that appeals to me, other than Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. I do enjoy the frozen confection aisle. I will buy almost anything by Blue Bell Creameries. If you don't have Blue Bell Ice Cream in your neck of the woods, I highly recommend you raise holy hell until your grocery stores carry it. It is manna from heaven. No lie. It is the BEST ice cream, bar none. It is made in Brenham, Texas, and for years it was only carried in Texas. I think they have started shipping it to other places now. So, that is the only plus to grocery shopping.

I hate people looking in my cart to see what oddities I have chosen. I hate people seeing that I allow my children to eat the sugary cereal with the toys in the box that cost about 50 bucks simply because they threw such an ungodly fit for it.

I end up covertly swatting my children's behinds a LOT in the grocery store, too. It seems to bring out the worst in my kids Which also means that it brings out the worst in me. They start the loose limbed foot dragging whining routine the moment we enter the store. They find bizarre things they NEED. "Mommy, I NEED some Diazinon and some cow manure for school." It's always something.

They fight over which damn side of the cart they each get to stand on. They hang on to the side of the cart and make it nearly impossible for me to push it. The youngest one will scream if I try to put him in the cart, and the oldest one acts incapacitated if I won't allow him to sit in the cart. (He is far too big to sit in that little seat, and yet he wants to, although he never did want to when he was a toddler.) He moans and says his feet hurt, his legs hurt, his head hurts. I threaten to make his butt hurt, although it does no good.

I end up speaking almost entirely through clenched teeth and making horrible threats. I once threatened to beat the oldest boy with the youngest boy. That's right. I said I would pick up the youngest like a baseball bat and whack the oldest one upside his head with his brother. Horrible, isn't it? I didn't work, either. They were properly shocked and promptly discounted the possibility that I would ever perpetuate such a travesty. I threaten to tie them to each other face to face when we get home. I've never done it, of course, but that one does seem to scare them. It was never done to me, either. I don't know where such a sinister idea came from, and I am sort of scared to think that my brain came up with that.

My kids seem to get very weepy whenever we are at the store. If I tell them "No" to something they want, the tears immediately begin to flow freely, and the whining commences. They don't do it loudly, they do it just loudly enough to make me feel like I am going to lose my mind. I tell them to please hush. They don't. They actually say "I can't stop it, Mommy, I just can't!" Let me guess....If I get you that box of popsicles with miniature pokedigicritters on it that costs $28.50, you will be able to stop crying,right?

I get very weepy at the thought of the store. I would rather go alone, but I have 3 kids. Two of them are in school, so I do try to go during the day when I only have my youngest. He will be in school next year, so I will have peace on my shopping sojourns. I doubt it will be any better. There is always something horrid happening in the seemingly harmless aisles of the grocery store. If it isn't my kids acting beastly, it is someone else's kid doing it. Or it is a little old lady trying to get me to sample her special cheesy fish bake on a cracker. Then, even if I say "No, thanks", they show me where I can purchase this culinary marvel. I feel guilty if I don't buy it, so I usually do. It sits in the freezer, and nobody eats it.

Oh, and why is it that no matter what I go to the store for, even if it is just milk, I come home with over $100.00 worth of NOTHING? Every single time. I can go in the store for bread and milk, and I leave with 10 bags worth of I don't know what. I never can seem to find anything to cook, either. My kids will look in the cabinets and say "Mom, we have NOTHING to eat! " "I KNOW!" I respond, and it's off to the grocery store for more fun.

I know, this is my own weakness. I know, I am obviously not a smart shopper. I am not a person who checks the prices on food. My husband will check the little tag thingie on the shelf that tells the price per serving or whatever. I just buy the one I usually buy. I don't know how much it costs, if we need it, I buy it. It it is new, I buy it. I am a marketing professionals dream, let me tell you. If there is a new cleaning product out, I buy it. Usually, my Mom buys it before I do, but it is getting to where I even beat her to it now. That alone is frightening to me.
If there is practically anything new on the shelves, I'll buy it. I haven't bought the green ketchup yet, but trust me, it is only a matter of time. Especially since ketchup is one of the food groups to my kids.

I don't make lists, I don't clip coupons. I don't know why. I just don't. Maybe because my mother never did, so I never really learned how to do all of this the smart way. Nope, I just set out and wander aimlessly buying whatever strikes my fancy or that of my whining limb dragging children. I do it under duress, and I do it often.

I have no witty ending for this. I have no solution to my problem. I hate to grocery shop. I hate having to waste money that could otherwise be used for pedicures or vacations on something like food. But, alas, we must eat. We must clean, and we must use various paper products for various personal hygiene reasons. These things are only available at the dreaded grocery store. Therefore, I continue to throw objects into my basket, threaten my children, (who are actually wonderful little people, they just are monsters at the store), and trudge up and down aisles full of canned and boxed products that I am told almost certainly have rat feces and urine on them. Have you heard that? The fact that warehouses evidently have a bad rodent problem, and thus all of our boxed and canned stuff is almost certainly contaminated on the outside of their packaging. Yet ANOTHER reason to hate this chore.

If you have any solutions, please feel free to leave a comment. Otherwise, I'm sure I'll be at the store tomorrow, as I was earlier today.


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