Worst Grocery Shopping Trip Ever

I had planned on posting an update of our Christmas activities today, but instead, I need to document what will go down in history as the most terrible shopping experience I have ever had with the girls in tow.

Today, I took the girls on our weekly grocery shopping trip to Sprouts for some fresh produce and vitamins. First, a little background: Sprouts has teeny tiny carts (unlike the huge carts that I love at Costco or the ones with double seats and steering wheels attached at Albertson’s or Target). Amelia usually goes in the front, and Samantha in the cart itself, which leaves little room for actual groceries.

I normally grab a basket, stick it underneath the cart and try and stuff all my groceries underneath so that the twins can’t grab anything, but today, I had put my diaper bag and a bunch of reusable shopping bags beneath the cart. I decided to cram my items around Samantha in the cart, which I’ve done on occasion and usually isn’t a problem.

Today of all days, I had to purchase several items cased in glass. You can see where this is going…
I picked out some black cherry juice and black elderberry syrup (sounds weird, but I use these, along with some other supplements, to make gummy vitamins for the girls as an immune booster. Jake has had a cold and I don’t want the girls catching anything.) Samantha ignored the cherry juice, which, thank goodness, was too heavy for her to pick up, but took great interest in the elderberry syrup, which was housed in a colorful little box.

Before I knew what was happening, Samantha had handed the elderberry syrup to Amelia to examine, which she promptly threw on the floor. Nothing looked immediately wrong, until I picked up the box and scanned the perimeter.

The glass had shattered, leaking syrup everywhere! There was black syrup on Amelia, black syrup on my white shirt, black syrup on my leather boots, black syrup all over the diaper bag, my reusable grocery bags, and my purse…not to mention the floor, which looked like a crime scene! I frantically dug around for some wipes to clean myself and Amelia, then the cart, and then the wheels of the cart, which were completely covered in extremely thick, black syrup. I had to push the cart a little bit forward whilst holding a wipe to the wheels so that I wouldn’t spread syrup all over the store.

Another side note: the aisles at Sprouts are very narrow. This isn’t usually a problem as I know exactly where everything is and normally zoom through the aisles before S and A have a chance to grab anything. While I was on my hands and knees trying to clean up the sticky mess from our bags under the cart, S and A were joyfully pulling chips, popcorn and anything within reach off the shelves. The aisles are so narrow, that no matter where I adjusted the cart, SOMETHING was always in S and A’s reach.

I alternated between scolding S and A/throwing their booty back on the shelves and continuing to scrub syrup off our clothes. I soon ran out of wipes and had to do the best I could with some tissue. I didn’t have anywhere to put the sticky wipes or tissues, so I put the whole mess in one of my bags, just to keep it somewhat contained.

An angelic mom in the same aisle sympathetically asked if I would like her to call someone over with a mop. “YES PLEASE!” I must have looked pretty pathetic because before leaving to go get someone, she added, “I’ve been there!”

After apologizing to the mop guy and stuffing items haphazardly back on the shelves, we made our way as quickly as possible through the store. My initial problem with not being able to put anything under the cart was exacerbated by the fact that the entire bottom half of the cart was now sticky with syrup. I continued to stuff groceries around Samantha, which gave the girls more ammunition with which to wreak havoc. Up until the point I finally gave them a graham cracker to munch on, the girls were taking bites out of unwashed produce (potatoes—ewwww!), snapping celery in half and throwing it out of the cart, tossing oranges, ripping produce bags in two, and trying their best to escape the cart.

To make matters worse, no less than four different people stopped me to ask me five billion questions about the twins and tell me how cute they were (REALLY? THEY ARE ACTING LIKE LITTLE DEVILS AND WE ARE ALL COVERED IN SYRUP). I’m usually pretty nice to people when we get stopped, but I was in such a hurry to get out of there before getting kicked out, that I gave one-word answers and didn’t make eye contact.

When we got to the check-out aisle, the checker looked at our motley crew and said, “Ummmm….would you like another cart?” On a good note, they didn’t charge me for the broken bottle of syrup and even walked me out to my car. I’m sure they were partly motivated by the fact that they wanted us out of there before we destroyed anything else!

Jake arrived home from work the same time I pulled in. He took one look at me, his jaw dropped, and since there were no words necessary, grabbed the girls so that I could commence washing syrup out of my hair, clothes, boots, purse and other bags.

The casualties:
My boots– stained.
My purse– stained.
My new white shirt from BR– stained.
The diaper bag– washed, but still stained.
My sanity– gone.

Miraculously, S and A’s shoes and other clothing were fine after washing. Figures.

And just because the day couldn’t get any more messy, Jake let them do some painting while I was recovering from our shopping trip from hell.