Helping

Will can sit in the basket at the grocery store now, and this is thrilling both for me and for him.  He likes to be able to see what is going on.  I imagine that an endless succession of industrial ceilings and fluorescent lights must be awfully boring.  I like it because it frees up important bottom of the cart real estate for things like groceries.  I realize that wanting to put groceries in the grocery cart shows that I am boring and pedestrian at heart, but there it is.

Anyway, he went with me on Saturday evening to do some much-needed grocery shopping.  We had snow Saturday morning, so everyone had gone out and frantically looted the stores of milk, eggs, and bread.  Apparently in St. Louis it is traditional to make French toast during snow storms.  Or perhaps not, but the grocery buying patterns seem to indicate that.  By Saturday afternoon, the snow had stopped, but the people had all done their shopping.  It was brilliant.  Very calm and soothing.  No one to bother us, lots of space to dither in the aisles.  This feeling may perhaps have been somewhat aided by the fact that Margaret and Ellie stayed home, but I'm sure that was negligible.*

I think Will enjoyed it too.  He seemed to want something in his fat little paws, so I gave him some parmesan cheese to chew on hold.  He began furtively.

As he realized that I was just the sort of permissive parent that would let this sort of thing go on, he became more obvious about his depredations.

He found it somewhat hard going, I think, but it kept him interested.


*I'm not.  Grocery shopping with one preverbal, non-ambulatory child was AMAZING.  It might be even better than grocery shopping alone, because then my stream of inconsequential nonsense could be assumed to be directed at the baby, and I didn't look like a crazy woman.