The kindness of strangers

Our weekend routine was messed up due to graduation on Sunday -- I went and proudly watched my friends receive their J.D.s (the boys stayed home, it was 50 degrees, raining, windy, and an outdoor ceremony ...). However, I was gone for about 4 and a half hours on Sunday, which cut into the weekly grocery shopping trip. Roy and I normally go together with the boys -- he takes the stroller, I take the cart, we "divide and conquer" and we're done very quickly. During the week, I might make quick stops at the store, but don't buy more than I can hold either in a shopping basket or in the baskets beneath the stroller. The boys were out of waffles and we were running low on milk, so I decided to make a trip to the store for the "major grocery shopping" by myself.


After class yesterday morning (2 hours of editing legal documents to look for typos, incorrect usage of homophones, placement of apostrophes, etc so that the professor could make her point that she expects near perfection in our written work), I got a message from the babysitter that Sam had thrown up. And he didn't just throw up, he threw up in his brand new carseat (I had taken 45 minutes before leaving for school to crawl around the back of her Honda Civic in order to install the new seats in the her car). When I got home, Sam was sleeping and after a 3 hour nap, seemed to feel better -- so off to the store we went.

As I was putting the babies into their stroller at the store, an older woman stopped me and told me she "admired me" for having the courage to get out of the house. Um, thanks? The store was thankfully empty, which was a good thing; it's hard to steer the double stroller with one hand while pulling a cart with the other! In the store, I got a lot of sympathetic glances from other women, and I thought I was doing pretty well entertaining the two boys while getting the groceries. In the dairy aisle, as I tried to navigate a narrow aisle with a giant display of Entenmann's baked good, this younger guy pushing a shopping cart was so obviously inconvenienced by me. I was pushing the stroller and pulling the cart -- and I could just HEAR him behind me, trying to figure out how to get around me. Um, well -- go around to the OTHER side of the display! I moved as far to the side as I could, and he brushed past me, grumbling to himself. Um, jerk -- if I saw the trainwreck that I am in an aisle, I would have avoided that aisle if at all possible! I am going to pretend that the guy was in a big hurry because he was on the way to the hospital to visit his sick grandma. Just reminded me again the huge difference between men and women -- or at least between those with children and those without!

In the checkout line, I had trouble using a check because my "rewards card" was linked to my personal checking account, not our joint checking account, and the 2% milk I had picked up for Sam had a sell by date of MARCH 30!! -- and the woman behind me, with two small children of her own, could have been exasperated about the wait -- but she wasn't, she had a kind word for me about it being "one of those days", and we commiserated about the number of hours left before bedtime. A nice (female) cashier offered to bring the cart to my car for me, and as I was strapping the boys in the carseats, another nice woman stopped me in the parking lot to tell me she couldn't imagine having twins, that she had two grown children herself and couldn't imagine having two at once. I really appreciated the kind words and gestures -- and when I finally got a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, I knew why the first woman had told me I had a lot of courage for going out! My hair, which had been curly and styled before carseat installation, class, puking baby, and grocery shopping, was a frizzy mess, I had huge bags under my eyes, my white sweater was dirty and stained -- I looked awful!

At least the grocery shopping was done for this week! And, in the future, I will be sure to avoid scheduling this on Sunday afternoon!