Grocery Store Gomorrah

Grocery Store Gomorrah

Okay, so I guess the mark of a successful blogger is knowing how to avoid TMI, which means that my visit to the OB/GYN to close down the Amy Lane Baby Factory is definitely out.  (Suffice it to say it was “unpleasant” and let’s leave it at that.)  As you all know, it is a bajillion degrees outside, and we are all ‘body space huddling’ in the air conditioning as though moving too much will actually cause the humature to go from ‘apocalyptic’ to ‘the devil changed his address to the church across the street’(seen here).    With this in mind, I used my return trip from the doctor’s office to go to the grocery store without my entourage of loud, adorable, easily pan-fried children, and consequently had time to reflect on the grocery store as the wellspring of my moral decay.

To prove it, there’s this photo, (or there would be, but it refuses to upload!) in which you will see juice boxes, apple juice and Fruit Loops.

Yes, this is where we keep them--next to the water cooler, against the wall.  You might keep them in the pantry, but that is where we keep food in boxes that we tried but didn’t like and now feel too guilty to throw away.  Now, the Fruit Loops, are, of course, alternately named Fruit of Satan’s Sugar Tree Loops, but there’s a reason we have them with children in the house.  Or more specifically, with this child in the house. (Please picture a perfectly adorable snapshot of the Kewyn the Cave Troll in this space...$#%^#@ computer.)     

This child doesn’t eat much.  Now looking at the rest of us, you may think that people in my family can afford to skip a meal or two, and you’d be right, but this one is perpetually underweight, so when he asks for food, any food, we jump right on that, and right now the thing he asks for is Fruit of Satan’s Sugar Tree Loops.  Besides, he’s the most constipated toddler I’ve ever met, and they make him poop.  Oops—TMI.  

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s move on to the innocuous looking baby-crack known as “apple juice”, and the pre-adolescent methadone in the foil pouches.  For some reason that has not quite translated to my husband and I—both college educated adults mind you--our pediatrician has blamed both the toddler’s ectomorphism and the middle-school children’s obesity on juice.  Please don’t bother me with the technical explanation—I’m sure there is one, and she’s given it, but it’s sailed over both our heads, and now I am  skeptical of this idea, and my husband openly mocks it.  He calls the doctor the ‘juice nazi’ in front of the older children.  We are obviously not nice people, and here’s proof that we don’t listen to the wisdom of the medical profession.  Somebody call CPS.  

I refuse to show pictures of my freezer—for one thing there’s little Ziploc packages of breast milk falling out which is an embarrassing fact of life, like having feminine protection falling out of your purse or something—but let’s just say that other than breast milk, it’s full to the brim with stuff you can cook in the microwave.  With the exception of the creamed spinach, which I bought with more blind optimism than good faith, this is not health food, nor is it stuff I can cook.  Did I mention the fact that it’s a bajillion degrees outside and my kitchen faces West?  It seems like cooking, actual cooking, right now is unpatriotic or something—I’d practically be renting the moving van for the devil, and we seem to be going to hell quickly enough as it is!

Which is why I bought the ice-cream—I figured it would make the trip more comfortable.