Note To Self About Grocery Shopping

Note To Self:  Avoid taking all the neighborhood teenagers grocery shopping with you.  Even if they want to tag along.  Even if they're super excited and you want to say no, but just can't because of the poor puppy dog look in their eyes...

The story:  We have a summer girl gang in our neighborhood.  Our yard crosses the street into another yard, which has a gate that opens up into another yard...all with teen and pre-teen girls.  A few other girls live around the corner and a few more around another corner, and a few more around another corner and down a few streets...  You get the picture.  It's actually pretty fun, but if teen girls tell you they don't like to eat, don't believe them.

Today, part of the gang was here at our house when I was going grocery shopping.  When they wanted to tag along, I could hear myself saying yes, but wanted to scream, "Nooooooooo!"  There was a marker fight in the car while they were waiting for me to leave...  I was nervous.  I remembered the days of shopping with toddlers and wondered what I'd gotten myself into.

It actually wasn't horrible.  I quickly figured out that (unlike shopping with toddlers) you can play a live version of Where's Waldo when you're shopping with teens.  They found me every time they wanted to put something in the cart.  At one point (when I was hiding on the canned foods aisle) there was a screaming toddler somewhere in the store, and right as I was thinking I was glad I really wasn't with toddlers that day, a man walked past me with his own cart and jokingly commented he was glad it wasn't his child.  I laughed and said, "It's not mine either."  Then I added,  "But the gang of teenagers running around the store is mine, and I'm hiding from them right now."   He laughed, and I went back to my game of Where's Waldo.

The catch was this:  My girls quickly figured out that whatever mom usually says no to in the grocery store can make it into the cart when friends are in the picture.  What can I say?  After all these years I still cave to peer pressure.

You're probably thinking it couldn't be that bad, but take a look again at the picture at the top of this post.  Add pizza to that, and it would be the food consumption of the neighborhood gang this afternoon.  This story will one day be known as: that day when we played Where's Waldo with mom in the grocery store and won so we got to take home all the junk food in the store...the end.