Camp Daddy goes grocery shopping
While we try to fill our days with Camp Daddy fun and activities, some days the work just has to get done. We love Instacart's grocery delivery service and Amazon Prime for doing our shopping and delivering it right to our door. But there’s no substitute for picking your own produce, so the boys and I piled in to the Camp Daddy bus and headed to the grocery store.
Carts
I envisioned the boys helpfully trailing along behind the cart as I blissfully squeezed and sniffed produce to pick the best of the best. Somehow I had forgotten that when my campers go to the grocery store, they do not simply walk along the aisles. Arrival at the grocery store begins the urgent pleas for space to ride on the grocery cart. These pleas are accompanied by explanations of recent injuries (“I have a Band-Aid so I can’t walk!”) and lively debates about who got to ride in the cart last time.
After a few tense minutes of discussion, I heaved the cart through the sliding glass doors of the grocery store, with the older boys standing on each side, and Noah on the very front, facing the store like Leonardo DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic.
This arrangement worked for about 30 feet. And then, just inside the store, they spotted it. The white whale of shopping carts – the race car cart. Then everything seemed to happen at once….
Ethan leapt from our mundane shopping cart and sprinted toward the race car cart. This sudden loss of weight caused the original cart to tip to one side because Dylan spied the race car a split second after Ethan. As I countered the sudden shift in weight to my right, Dylan jumped off the cart and the whole thing nearly tipped the other direction.
Noah, momentarily stunned by the commotion interrupting his ‘king-of-the-world’ moment in front, simultaneously jumped off the cart and began shouting – like me, he did not know what was happening at first, but he wasn’t about to let his older brothers get away with whatever injustice he assumed was coming his way.
Dylan was closer to the race car when things started and so he reached it first. He quickly heaved himself up toward the two child seats. Undeterred, Ethan climbed up the front of the race car cart (a two-basket model set up almost like shopping cart stairs).
As Noah comprehended exactly what the older two were after he ran to the cart, grabbing Dylan’s shirt and pulling for all his might. This had no effect on Dylan.
So there we were, one minute into our grocery expedition, blocking the entire entrance of the store with two carts. Dylan and Ethan cheerfully celebrating their victory, Noah tearfully asserting his constitutionally guaranteed right to ride in a race car shopping cart, while I stood with my empty cart wondering why I had ever rejected Instacart in the first place.
As it turned out, Dylan is WAY too tall for sitting comfortably in the race car cart. He happily gave up his seat for Noah and after returning the original cart to the cart area, we were finally on our way.
Shopping lists
As Dylan pushed the cart toward our first stop in the produce aisle, I pulled out my phone to check out our grocery list.
Many of you know that I am a huge fan of Amazon’s automated voice assistant Alexa. We use ours to play music and news, look up information, and tell us the weather. (There's even a time out app so you can let Alexa parent for you!) I especially love her ability to keep a running shopping list. For example, as I use up the last of the flour, I simply shout “Alexa, add flour to the shopping list” and there’s no need to think about it again.
But as with any technology, it can be a dangerous tool when it is in the wrong hands. When I opened the Alexa App on my phone, the grocery list read something like this:
Candy
Butts
Sugar
Butts
Candy
Bacon
Hot Dogs
Butts
Syrup
Butts
Flour
And so on…..
Ah, the joys of elementary age boys.
As we drove home an hour later, one thought repeated in my head. Maybe Instacart picking our produce isn’t so bad after all.
Butts.
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