I’d Like to Thank All of the Little People Who Made This Possible
The contest is officially—–OVER!
And I win.
You are looking at the newly crowned Parent of the Year. Thank you. It is an honor.
I’ve been doing plenty throughout the year to ensure that my name was listed among the finalists, but I think I pretty much sealed the deal this afternoon.
As afternoons go, this one had been pretty lazy. No plans, no agenda and even less motivation even if there were. Need an idea of just how lazy? I watched golf. On television. Yeah, that lazy.
Turns out we needed a few items from the grocery so I packed up the kids and off we went. Cereal, juice, some fruit, milk. Speaking of milk. Has anyone else noticed an overall drop in the ppg (price per gallon)? It’s usually in the $2+ range or on sale at $1.98 with your plus card. Today, one gallon was $1.77. The half gallon was 0.79 cents. Why?
Why can I get 2 half gallons of milk–or eight, as the case may be–and pay 0.19 cents less per gallon than if I just bought one whole gallon–or four? I don’t get it.
Anyway, the list was short and I was relieved to be getting out of the store for under a c-note. That’s a banner grocery day in our house. I paid for our items, had them bagged in our reusable recycled fabric bags–it’s a little something I’ve been trying to do–and we made our way to the car.
As is the norm, the kids hopped in and began fighting while I unloaded the groceries. After it was emptied, I returned the cart to it’s proper storage location in the parking lot, made way back to the car, started it up and backed out of the parking space. While backing out, I turned around to make sure I wasn’t going to hit anyone or thing behind me and that’s when I noticed it.
An empty car seat.
Right smack dab in the middle of the row.
“Where’s Zella?”
Zoë actually looked down at her lap as if she might have been hiding there. Everyone looked towards the empty seat and then each other.
“I don’t know,” was the collective response.
So I pulled back into the parking lot, unloaded the kids–what kids I had left with me–and back into the store we went.
I found Zella in very short order. She was standing at the service desk looking ever so adorable, talking with the lady at the counter and another customer who was looking quite frazzled. I nodded, smiled and said, “She’s mine.”
“Oh, thank the Lord!” the woman exclaimed. “I was so worried.”
“I’m so sorry to have troubled you,” I said and thanked the woman for looking after Zella.
“Zella, what happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. It’s a pretty common response around our house. But by using it in this instance I could tell that the event had absolutely no effect on her. She actually seemed surprised to see me back so soon.
“Well, let’s go. We need to get back home before all that milk goes bad.”
“Wait, Dad! Wait! My sticker.” And she pointed to the woman coming back our way.
The woman with the smiley face sticker and what appeared to be–
my trophy.
Parent of the Year—because I left my kid in a grocery store.
