by Ann Johnson

Created on: September 30, 2008

Grocery shopping is not the most joyous of tasks at the best of times. No matter how much promising, coaxing or threatening you do with the kids, and no matter how much they promise to behave, someone is going to play up.

I needed a few things from the shops, so when there, did the same thing everyone does, put my son sitting facing me in the seat provided in the shopping trolley. He was around 2 years old.

Shopping progressed relatively painlessly, until I rounded a corner to enter the next isle. Do you know how you round a corner, and take it a little wider than necessary? I did this, and looking to my right whilst still pushing the trolley, heard a smash. My head whipped around, to see my son with his arm out, smiling sweetly as he had just knocked over a stack of cardboard trays full of jars of tomato paste, probably around 24 of them. Glass and tomato paste spewed across the isle, so I had to stay and wave someone down to report it. The staff were very polite, and although I offered to clean it up myself when they brought a mop and bucket, they wouldn't hear of it, and sent me on my way to finish shopping.

I was so embarrassed, tried to keep my mind on shopping, but every time I passed someone in the isle, I wondered what they must be thinking!

Then, as I reached into the freezer to get the last of my shopping and get out of there, my son let out a squeal. What now?

Now he has somehow turned himself around in the seat, and squeezed his chubby legs down the back of the seat, in the hinged spot where the seat folds up if you don't use it- a space much too small for his fat, chubby legs to fit. First I tried to just pull his legs out, then I tried lifting him up so his legs straightened up and hopefully I could drag him out, but nothing was going to get them out. By now he is screaming, and people are walking by laughing and rolling eyes. Let the earth open up and swallow me please!

An elderly man stopped and asked if I thought this would help, and proceeded to open up a small tub of margarine he had just retrieved from the fridge section. He opened it up, peeled back the paper, dived into it with his fingers, slapped some on my son's legs and told me to rub it on. I did, and then tried pulling him out again, and this time it worked. I thanked him, he left, I went through the checkout, paying for the life saving tub of margarine, and have never been back to that shop again.

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