The baby, the car seat and the supermarket trolley

I was going to write a short post about the DVD we watched last night, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. However, I didn't find it that interesting (the best part was probably the invasion of the gigantic robots in the first half hour).

I'm not going to post about Baby's continuing post-jab fussiness, which has her calling for room service every 3 hours at night and then not settling back to sleep once she's fed, because you're probably bored of hearing about all that by now.

So I'll tell you about the time I took pity on my mum and went grocery shopping with her.

Of course, I had to bring Baby with me. I'd hoped that she would just sleep in her carseat, but she stayed awake throughout the two hour expedition, wide-eyed at her first glimpse of the Pak 'n' Save supermarket interior.

While my mum carefully selected fruit from the bottom of the oranges bin and olive oil from the back of the shelf (which is where she believes the newest produce is hidden), I tried to steer the trolly back and forth over the bumpier surfaces.

I was thankful that Baby didn't have a too-much-stimulation meltdown, but I was still concerned that she'd be heavily in sleep debt by the time we got home. By the time we got to the check-out, it was already and hour an a half into what would have been her nap time.

Then something rather embarrassing happened - I couldn't get the car seat off the shopping trolley. I tried and tried and tried and tried. The kind gentleman behind us in the queue tried too, but it was looking tricky. He suggested that I remove Baby from the car seat, so he could put a bit more grunt into it without tipping out it's precious cargo. Unfortunately I'm so short that I couldn't reach up to get her out without putting my hands into a painful manoeuvre. So the kind gentleman in the queue behind us had to do that for me too.

Finally he succeeded in removing the car seat from the trolley. It took maybe ten or fifteen minutes. I bet the other shoppers in the queue were none too impressed.

By then I was all hot and clammy from the effort, the pain in my wrists, the embarrassment and the worry about how Baby was going to handle missing her sleep. I told my mum it would be a good long time before I did this again. I told her it would have to wait until Baby either starts dropping off to sleep in car seats again, or is old enough to have longer awake times.

She rang me up a week later asking for a ride to the supermarket...

Last week my car broke down and hasn't moved from it's garage since, but really - I haven't been praying to the car gods.