After Jenna's dance class today, we stopped at the grocery store to get bags of salad for dinner tonight. But this was a new grocery store; one that I've never been to before.
I had no idea where the salad was and I couldn't see it from the entrance of the store, so we started on the right hand side and walked along the edges of the store until we found the salads, because they are usually on some wall in every store. As we were walking, Jenna kept touching *everything* in sight. When I realized she was doing this, I asked her to stop. She didn't. I saw her little hands beginning to graze the glass bottles of barbeque sauce and I immediately grabbed her hand.
After asking her several more times I started to tell her that if she touched on more thing that she would lose her computer privileges tomorrow. As those words came out of my mouth, she knocked over a lightbulb and it, of course, smashed into lots of tiny bits.
We stopped. Jenna knew she was in trouble. Surprisingly, I didn't get all worked up about it, I just calmly told her that the lightbulb was broken because she didn't listen to me the first time I asked her not to touch all the merchandise. (We are currently working on listening on the first time directions are given. It obviously didn't work out too well today.) Jenna was crying. I was trying to talk to her and find somene to clean up the broken glass at the same time.
There was an older man standing about five feet away from us and as I got up to ask the lady at the deli counter to help, he looked at me and said, "That wouldn't have happened if she wouldn't have touched the lightbulb." Now I was ticked. Really ticked. I am used to the occasional spectacle that we can be in a store. I've shopped with screaming kids before, knocked over an entire display of Ragu spaghetti sauce before, and picked up 50 apples that have fallen off the display in the produce section because Abby decided to swipe the one from the very bottom. But I have never had anyone talk to me directly, and make such an obvious and irritating observation.
I looked at this guy and said, "Do you think I don't know that? Really, do you think I don't know that the lightbulb wouldn't have broken if she wouldn't have touched it?"
I know, I know . . . not a very nice thing to say and certainly not very pastor wifish of me, but I just couldn't hold back. I'm happy that this particular store is not my normal grocery store. I won't be going back anytime soon!
2 comments:
It never ceases to amaze me what comes out of other people's mouths. People forget that they were once 4-year-olds who touched everything and didn't listen to their mom's. You handled it well. Better than me, I think.
really now--was it one of those 20 dollar light bulbs that's supposed to be so good for the environment? He's either OCD or having a really bad/self-righteous day himself. To anyone who's never broken anything in a store, or never had their child touch all sorts of stuff as they went by, even if their mommy told them not to, to that person, the chance to throw the first stone. Hang in there! susan
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