Shopping Cart Envy

My bi-weekly grocery shopping trip to Waremart is, by far, my least favorite chore. I shop at this particular store because I can reduce my grocery bill by nearly half if I shop there rather than at my local Safeway. It takes twenty minutes to drive there, and then at least an hour to load up the cart with two weeks of groceries, then unload onto the belt for check-out, and then pack everything into bags and pile them into the cart. After that, I load everything into my monster car, drive twenty minutes back home, unload and put away. Usually I end up having to clean out the refrigerator of old stuff to make room for the new, so that adds time to the chore. After several failed and miserable attempts, I no longer take the kids with me. The last time I brought them along the entire grocery cart flipped over on our way out, just as I had taken Charlie out of the front part. That was a little scary. I also found that I couldn't concentrate enough to remember everything that I needed, and keep John from bolting out of automatic sliding doors every time his feet hit the linoleum. I now do all shopping at night, when Mike's home, and usually after the kids are in bed.

So, you can imagine my mood while I'm wandering the aisles of Waremart, late at night, hungry and tired, trying to fill the cart with nutritious food for my family, all the while knowing that every item I plunk in the cart is going to have to be packed from the cart to a bag to the car to my kitchen -- all by ME. It wears me out just thinking about it. The particular store I go to is located in a college town, so usually the store is filled with alarmingly chipper college students who are picking up their weekly groceries. Last night I couldn't help but eye what they had in their carts or baskets. Cereal, yummy kinds of cereal, seemed to be a popular item. I think I lived on those giant bags of cold cereal when I was in college. Now, in order to set a good example for my sugar-addicted toddler, we buy practical things like Shredded Wheat and Cheerios. Gone are the days of Cocoa Roos and Marshmallow Mateys. I saw several young people buying two or three bananas. Two or three bananas would not survive the day at my house. Now I usually buy at least fifteen, maybe twenty bananas, as green as possible, so they can stay somewhat yellow through the week after my shopping trip. I didn't see one college kid pick up the whole chickens that were on sale for 77 cents a pound (I grabbed two). In the old days I would never buy chicken or meat at all, for that matter. It was too much work, and I would have rather just gone without (that's what visiting parents is for). Now I see a whole chicken as two meals -- a roasted chicken for Sunday and then soup for later on in the week. I'm a regular Betty Crocker (gag!).

It was in the toilet paper aisle, though, that I nearly had a break-down. While I was wrestling an enormous 24-pack of whatever was on sale in my cart, there was a cute college girl selecting a pure-cotton four-pack to put in her basket. Suddenly I was a little envious. How I missed the pure cotton feel of fancy toilet paper! Remember when all I needed were four rolls to get me through a week or two? There was no need to find storage for roll after roll of single-ply paper so I could sustain my family's TP needs through the winter. At that moment I had an epiphany. Along with the larger-than-life package of toilet paper, I added a fancy four-pack to my cart. And now, when I'm all alone, in the only room in the house with a lock on the door, I can feel like I'm 20 again.

Amy