Shopping makes me want to...

I’m not a really big fan of shopping. I really hate going to the grocery store. And, I especially hate going to the grocery store with a long, long list. I’ll do it, I just won’t like it. As K-Man was having dinner last night, I realized we were dangerously close to being out of a few key staples of his diet – most notably hummus, milk, mac & cheese and what K-Man refers to as “breakfast cookies” (a made-up name that makes him want to eat the healthy breakfast bars). So, after dinner, we went on a bit of an adventure to our local Trader Joe’s.

K-Man didn’t want to sit in the cart. He is, after all, a big boy now. So, he’d rather walk next to the cart, or better yet – push it into various food displays. After K-Man’s “driving,” one banana had certainly seen better days. (You squish it…you buy it. Gonna take it out of his college fund.)

Because Trader Joe’s is one of K-Man’s favorite places (apple fell VERY far from the tree on that one), he knows where his staples are. He went straight to the hummus, shredded cheese and milk (three different locations). “Here, Daddy,” he said, as he handed me the hummus. “Maybe we should get two?” (He has a little passive-aggressive streak in him. “Maybe we should…” starts many sentences that are easily translated to mean, “Get this,” or “go this way,” or “I want this.”)

So, we had the hummus, milk, cheese (and a random yogurt that he wanted because of the packaging) and we were on our way to pick up the breakfast cookies. He was holding my hand and I was pushing the cart. As he was singing his favorite song, he couldn’t have been more than a step behind me when…he just puked right in the aisle next to the frozen meats.

I looked back to see why he had stopped walking and there was his lunch and dinner in all its glory. There weren’t any secrets about what he had eaten in the last few hours. And, perhaps there wasn’t any doubt that he had eaten too much of all of it.

Before the valiant Trader Joe’s staff could arrive, I failed miserably to clean up the mess with a small [filtered word]tail napkin. But, I did manage to at least confine the blast zone so that when the poor soul did arrive with the bucket, mop and paper towels – the mess didn’t look quite as scary.

The worst part may have been that I had to wait (maybe) three minutes for the Trader Joe’s enforcements to arrive. Could very well have been the longest three minutes of my entire life. When K-Man hurled, nobody was in the aisle. After K-Man tossed – it seemed as though every person in the store came on by. It was like someone had started spreading a rumor, “Hey, check out the big pile of puke in the frozen food aisle!" There were so many people streaming by, I half expected to see some guy selling tickets to walk down the aisle, or a vendor selling, “I survived the great Trader Joe’s puke explosion of 2008.”

I offered to help the guy clean up. In fact, I offered to clean up the whole thing. “Nah," he said, "this is what I get paid for.” I thought that was particularly sad, and my own job suddenly seemed 1,000 times better. He continued, “This happens pretty much every day.” Now my job seemed a million times better!

K-Man, of course, found the entire thing to be incredibly entertaining. In the midst of the craziness, I finally asked him, “K-Slice, are you okay? Does your tummy hurt?” He didn’t even bother to answer. He was too excited by the attention and action. “Did you see this, Daddy?” as he pointed to his digestive artwork. “I went acccchhhh.” (He actually has a very refined puking impression that is well beyond his two-and-a-half years.) Oh, K-Man, I saw it all right.

Needless to say, when we got home, the first words out of K-Man’s mouth (and nice that words were now coming out and not lunch) were, “I wanna eat!” Given my own delicate constitution, the last thing I wanted to do was give him something that might come back up again – especially since the Trader Joe’s staff would be less likely to clean up any vomit in my house.

So, he had a few pretzels, watched a little hockey and went to sleep – all without tossing his cookies again. I have no idea what made him throw up. Maybe it was just the idea of shopping.