Judge Reinhold* Mouths Off to Me at the Grocery Store

I hate grocery shopping.  With a passion.  The only reason I was doing the shopping is because the Absent-Minded Professor was out of town and we were down to brown rice and a half-empty jar of Bama grape jelly. The grocery stores in Texas sell everything from Q-tips to bedroom furniture, and the overwhelming hugeness gives me panic attacks.  (On the plus side, they all seem to have lots of samples out, which is helpful, because my blood sugar starts to run low after the first twenty aisles or so.) Anyway, I had already forgotten to get hot dog rolls and now they were, like, two miles back.  So when some guy at the store began to pass judgment on my parenting choices, I was not. in. the. mood.

"How come the girls are walking and the little prince gets to ride in the cart?" he asked.  (Little Dude happens to have curly blond hair like the lad in Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, but I'm pretty sure Judge Reinhold here wasn't making a literary reference.)

Let me just clear something up: Little Dude is four.  Even without his "special needs," he is still young enough to ride in the cart.  I know this because he still fits in there.  The girls are aged six, nine, and nine.  They don't fit in the cart. 

So as best as I can figure out, Mr. Helpful was saying that:

1. Riding in the grocery cart is somehow effeminate;
2. I'm spoiling Little Dude, making him into a "little prince;" and
3. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.  Wait -- no -- that's a line from The Little Prince, and we've all agreed that he's not making that comparison.

All this ran through my mind, but all I mustered to say was, "well, it's easier for me this way."

"A boy that age should walk," Uncle Creepy persisted.

And a man your age should mind his damn business.

Look, I'm terrified of the day Little Dude is too big for the cart. There are a lot of things about children that can make grocery stores challenging, and Asperger's just magnifies the situation. The cart makes him feel safe in a bright, noisy, crowded store.  He likes to touch everything, so getting through anything bigger than a 7-11 will take forever. 

Ripping Mr. McJudgeypants a new one would have been super-entertaining in any other scenario, but I hate the grocery store too much to invest my time in explaining myself.  Plus, the popsicles were melting and my geriatric bladder was asking to go home.  

Sorry.  This would be a better blog post if I could report that I said that I was already clogging the aisle like so much cholesterol with my cart and kids as it was.  And that he should try grocery shopping for a family of six, on a budget, and see if he wasn't ready to ride in the cart himself, right to Bonkersville Institute. And that if he wanted to go around spouting his foul opinions, he should do something about that cat breath.  And that I think I know why he's buying "Single Man" frozen dinners.

Blogger FAIL: I just kind of gave him an "mm-hmm" and kept rolling.

Last week I was reading a parenting forum online wherein a mother asked about others' experiences using child harnesses.  A couple of women weighed in with diatribes on how inhumane "baby leashes" are, and that we should all learn to get better control over our kids. 

And then thirty-five other moms wrote in to tell those first two to suck it.  Because it was from the comfort of my own home, as opposed to the panic-inducing Kroger, I chimed right in:

I used harnesses (the backpack kind) with my twin girls when they were toddlers. It gave them some freedom when they were sick of the stroller. YES I know it's important to teach children boundaries and "keep a keen eye on them." It's also super-important to keep them from being squished by a car.

You know, if some mom with four kids wants to give me constructive parenting criticism, I'll take it.  I'll even listen to experts like Orville Redenbacher and Qui Gon Jinn.  I'll listen to Judge Wapner and Judge Judy.  But old guys at Kroger and women who don't have kids but lurk on parenting boards anyway can keep their judgments to themselves.

That's right.  The most vocal opponent of harnesses were: a woman with a one-month-old, and another who wrote in to say that although she doesn't have kids yet, she would never use a harness. Bwahahahahahahahaha. You just know that when she has kids she will be blessed with quadruplets who all run in different directions. Because karma is hilarious.