never go grocery shopping when your toddler is hungry

Of the list of errands a stay at home mom is confronted with, buying groceries is by far one of my favorites.  It's pretty easy and I've kind of always enjoyed wandering around the grocery store.  Katelyn loves it because she gets to eat a free cookie while riding shotgun in the race car cart.

This afternoon though, I guess the cookie just wasn't cutting it.  Somewhere along the freezer aisle, between the sweet potato fries and the frozen pizzas, I noticed a trail of little pieces of cardboard littered all over the floor.  They looked familiar, I thought, and then I remembered that only an aisle over, Katelyn had climbed out of her race car, walked over to the frozen dinners, opened the door of the freezer, and pulled out a 65 cent chicken pot pie.  I told her she could have it for dinner tonight, meaning that we would pay for it, take it home, and cook it in the oven.  She insisted on holding it so I let her take it with her back into the plastic car attached to the front of the cart.

Then I realized that my child was eating a completely frozen chicken pot pie in the middle of the freezer aisle at Krogers.

And I tried not to laugh.  I really did.  I made a truly valiant effort to reprimand the two year old with a mouth full of frozen pasty in my best stern and motherly voice.

At the checkout, the cashier took one look at the mangled pot pie box and said, "Ummmmm...  Do you want this?  Someone opened it."  To which I replied, "Yes.  My daughter took a bite out of it."  We had a good laugh.

One of Katelyn's most favorite things about grocery shopping is helping us put the groceries away when we get home.  I hand her the items from off of the counter and she dutifully carries them to Dave who tells her whether they go in the pantry or the fridge.  It has turned what was once a five minute simple procedure into a half hour process that results in another fifteen minutes of me trying to reorganize the food she has thrown into my pantry.

It is double the effort but it is also double the fun.

One little quirk about Kate and her willingness to help with the groceries is that she likes to take a bite out of everything she puts away.  Most of our groceries end up looking like this...

...or this.

Oh well.  Sometimes I wonder if years from now I will be wishing that I could trade the petulant complaining about chores for a few toddler bite marks in my food.