An Actual Post About My Kid

Last night I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things I needed for dinner. As we were walking in, Caitlyn spotted the carts that have those Little Tykes Cozy Coupe cars attached to the front of them and promptly begged "PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE" and "Tutu".

As an aside here, let me explain the whole "tutu" thing. You see, I'm raising a smart child and Rodolfo is raising a dumb one. Because I teach her things. I tell her what word to use to describe something when she doesn't know what it is. And Rodolfo lets her believe that whatever word she attachs to an object is the correct one. It started with a racing game he has on his phone. She likes to play it and saw the cars and thought they were trains. Tutu is actually choo-choo. So now, not only does she think a car is a train, but she thinks the noise a train makes is tutu.

Anyway. So she wanted to go in the car and even though they are a huge pain in the ass to steer, I realized I was making my life easier by letting her sit in there and play as opposed to her usual grocery store behaviors of wanting to hold then chew on everything I put in the cart, taking off her shoes, and climbing out of the cart.

She thought tutu time was the most novel thing ever. She smiled and honked the horn and squealed with delight. She greeted passers-by. She sat in that fucking car and let me do my damn shopping. It was a delight.

I was feeling a little smug by the time we checked out. This was when I was expecting the meltdown to happen. I expected her to start climbing out of the car and touching everything, especially when the woman in front of us on line was moving at the speed of fucking snail, buying her 10 quarts of fucking non-dairy creamer. But she sat as patiently as I've ever seen her, in her car while we waited.

So I'm standing there thinking about this little victory over my toddler. Feeling smug. Thinking about how she made everyone we passed in the store smile with her sweet greeting. Feeling superior, even.

And then Caitlyn turned around to me with a huge smile. Was she smiling simply because she is the most pleasant kid ever? No. She was smiling because she had a candy bar in each hand and was trying her best to gnaw through the wrapper on one of them. Which explains why she wasn't trying to get out of the car and acting like an asshole.

So I ended up buying 2 cookies and cream Hershey bars because they were already smashed and covered in my kid's saliva. She could have at least picked a GOOD candy.