Clean up in aisle three please!

Tags

Dubai, misbehaving, mum, parenting, supermarket, toddler, trolley

I’ve just come back from what should have been a simple quick dash to the local supermarket. Alas it turned out to be a rather stressful and almost disastrous outing. I can feel the sweat running down my back and need to take a shower the fact that it way probably 45C in the parking lot doesn’t help. My arms hurt and not from carrying shopping! No, the reason I am feeling rather harassed is my very cute, very curious, very social little mermaid. At just over 16 months she is no longer content to just sit in the seat of the trolley. No problem I thought, I’ll just pop you in the trolley itself and you can sit down. Bad idea, we nearly ended up with scrambled eggs. She opened a packet of steak and tried to lick it, she sat on the bread and attempted to throw the rest of the shopping out of the trolley. So I put her back into the seat and spent the rest of the shopping trip making wrestling her sit back down.

She is at that rather awkward phase where she doesn’t quite understand yet why she is not allowed to run through the supermarket by herself. She doesn’t understand that if she falls out of the trolley it will hurt and she certainly doesn’t understand what would happen to those poor eggs if she jumped up and down on them. Combine this lack of comprehension with a discovery of her own will and how to show her own displeasure by shrieking  and you have a recipe for disaster. I wonder how long this will last and when I will be able to give her little jobs to do for herself such a grab some milk and go and get these apples weighed. Until then I will keep repeating to myself; it’s’just a phase! or leave her home so I can get my shopping done in peace and can tut at the other parents with misbehaving toddlers. 

No doubt what any aisle would have looked like if the little mermaid had been left to her own devises.