My Toddler Threw A Whopping Tantrum In The Middle Of The Supermarket”¦

I’ve seen plenty of kids lose it and have never said anything to their barely coping parents, but from now on, I will!

Ding-Ding!

Round 1: The Easy One!

I don’t recall our eldest son ever having a tantrum during a shopping trip. Maybe it’s some kind of sleep-deprivation-derived amnesia, but I am pretty sure he didn’t ever try to discredit my parenting in public places, rather he seemed to enjoy the whole process in general. Perhaps because it was just the two of us on those unhurried grocery-collecting ventures, that I had more time to devote to giving him my undivided attention, that he didn’t feel the need to yell and carry on, or maybe it was the free reign with a punnet of cherry tomatoes (stuff the mess) that kept him happy and me sane. I thought I was clever for not taking him shopping tired or starving and that I did all the things he liked to keep him cheering. One lady told me he’d start purring because I was rubbing my hand over his head while we waited at the check-out, I laughed and said ‘He already is’, then thought myself even more clever for knowing how to keep my touch-loving child calm.

Turns out I am not extra clever, I was just really, really lucky.

Round 2: Get Ready To Sweat!

My first encounter with supermarket scream-a-thons came via our youngest son, and oh my goodness, it was a shock for me. Not that he was cranky (kids get cranky), but that he was so devastated that we’d walked into a shop instead of out of it, that he pointed and screamed at full song ‘That way, that way!’ non-stop for I don’t know how long. I waited for a concerned citizen to demand my identification or prove parentage of the obviously stolen toddler (why else would he want to go the opposite way from me?), or to at least ask me to stop pinching the child, but not a single word was proffered. Plenty of lemon-sucked, pucker-face mouths from some old girls were shot my way and even more when I executed the installation of every parent’s life-saving device and gave him a Chuppa-Chup. If no one will help, what else is there to do? He wasn’t being ‘naughty’, he was being 2 and lollipops are laced with magic dust.

I came away from that round thinking I was on my own from here on in and had better get used to it.

Click Over For Round 3…

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