Sunday, November 06, 2005

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.

5 comments:

Avery's mom said...

I'm so unsure of how to place a carrier for my baby in a shopping cart...i can see myself in the same predicament

Amanda said...

I was never relaxed about missing naps. I found it quite difficult because I could see people thinking I was being mean and neurotic for cutting visits short etc but, on the other hand, every time, against my better judgement I allowed my daughter to become overtired because of other peoples demands (especially grandparents) I was the one who'd have to deal with hours of overtired, crying baby in the evening. No fun for me or her. And in the end I decided it was actually more about her than me and that I had an obligation to protect her and put her before other people as she couldn't speak for herself.

Violet said...

robyn: it looked so easy. Actually it was easy. It was getting it off again that required instructions!

eb: I know! It looked easy enough. Fortunately it wasn't peak shopping time or there'd have been more than a few dirty looks from the queue. I used to internally scream whenever my mum took so long, then I found a way to "zen" out - play the snake game on my mobile while waiting!

mtnw:I think I may get a little too anxious about missing naps. Some days Baby naps exactly how I think she's supposed to, and still doesn't sleep well at night. Other days she doesn't nap but sleeps through the night...

glomgold said...

From my experience the back of the store shelf IS where they put the newest products! It's a pain getting there though.

Violet said...

glomgold: well yeah, but who can bother to get right to the back of the shelf for every single grocery item!!