Supermarket Sweep: Toddler in Tow and 4×4 Anger

Saturday babe and I headed off to get the weekly stash of food at the local supermarket. Any trip of this nature with a little person is always going to take twice as long as going solo. But the height of my frustration came from another source, one that clearly had ’I am a total selfish moron’ banded across their forehead. I could see it, I’m sure others could too

So what has inspired me to be so scathing, you maybe asking right now?
It was the giant 4×4 driver that parked next to me in the DEDICATED parent and child parking spot! As the whole 2.2 designer clad crew clambered out of the black Landrover beast, I peered over to check out the ages of the spoilt (come on they must be spoilt?) sprogs. There was no way either of them were anywhere near the age of 5!

The family followed me into the store and as we walked past the parent and child sign, I looked up, looked at the adults and looked sternly at the sign. I did this a couple of times in the hope they’d get the message. Alternatively they probably thought I was Nutter. Was I bothered, no!

Onwards we trundled as babe called out “num nums”
This is what she says to ask to be nursed. It also translates into ‘I’m hungry or thirsty mummy’. It was mid morning she was getting pekish so I made a bee line for the cheese counter – buy cheese and get kind lady to give the hungry toddler a chunk to shut her up. It works a treat. If I’m lucky, extra quick and the chunk is big enough, we can make it to the bread aisle to give babe the crust of the end of a French stick (to clarify – the one I’m about to buy) to last her through until we get home.

Toilet trips get in the way though
These are the new time sink in the weekly shop. We have to go at least twice! And usually she just walks in, looks around, shakes her head and says ‘no’. So I end up peeing to make myself feel better about the time spent meandering to the far end of the shop.

Then the tantrum breaks out
She wants to bite through and break into the bag of mozzarella cheese – this child is a cheese monster. This is not happening, so I prize it from her hands and little ‘toddler balling hell’ breaks loose. People who have long forgotten what it’s like to have a young child look on like I’m a bad mother. Others cast warming looks of sympathy, and I’m grateful to them.

We move on, babe helps load in the butter – not before dropping the block and turning it into a pyramid, but it tastes all the same to me.

All goes well until I make the mistake of walking past the pic-a-mix sweets section. Why do they have sweets that can be helped themselves to on floor level? They are asking for little slobbery fingers pounce and attack! I managed to grapple babe up into my arms and get her preoccupied with restacking the economy gravy granules, all neatly upside down.

Babe shelf stacking

Finally the paying and packing goes smoothly, now just to do the dreaded pack away when we get home.

Come share your children supermarket trials and 4×4 dislike here…you know you want to.

Pottyhood Part 12: Toilet Tastic

So babe is now out of the nappies and is on the home straight towards the goal of being fully toilet trained. But going out and doing anything anywhere seems to take twice as long, as it usually involves countless trips to the nearest toilet and some toddler protest flashing.

Off to town babe and I went on Saturday, and all the time we had to keep diverting off for a wee wee stop. I now have a good map of all the emergency loo locations within a short hop of any point in Exeter city centre.

There are times when I know she is crying wolf – when she has just had a wee within the last 15 minutes for example. So I gently tell her “no you don’t, wait a little bit”.

But she wasn’t going to take this for a satisfactory answer in Debenhams and proceeded to pull her trousers and pants down right in the middle of the thoroughfare to the till. It caused a good few laughs, as I dashed over to hoist up her clothing. But then still, after that we trundled off to the bog. This happened to be on the same floor, because we had just come from there. But no, no pee pee. Argh!!!!

I only wish she would be so diligent at home – it largely has to be me asking if she wants the toilet.

The Potette (click to find out more from a previous post) is not redundant though, it came in really handy when I was in an M&S changing room (I’m generally not an M&S clothing kind of girl except for some of the undies), when babe conveniently informed me of her toilet requirements.

So I whipped out the travel potty, put one of the rather expensive bags in it, and the good Little Miss produced. As she sweetly walked out of the changing room with the tied bag in hand, the shop assistant asked “what’s that you’ve got there, a bag of sweets”

I couldn’t resist by explaining that it wasn’t that exciting, she responded with “oh raisins then”

“No not even that good, its wee” was my reply.

That perplexed her!

*I realized that sounded a little odd, so I attempted a short explanation of how the Potette works. By this time all she could think about was…eeewww*

Pottyhood Part 7: Whoops She Does it Again

Potty training in your face!

Babe and I have been busy little bakers this last week, just check out my list in the blog post below. At the same time, we’ve been progressing on our pottyhood journey. Put these two together and you get some interesting results…what is that I can smell stinky? What is that dangling from your back-end stinky?

Have I whet your appetite to read on? Or maybe you’ll be thinking twice about accepting one of my cupcakes. If you feel the need to be informed about what doesn’t go into my food and can tolerate another poo story, please continue. Nope? Well stop now.

Baking and more
We were baking and babe didn’t want to wear trousers or a nappy. I’m cool with this, it means she can run and hop on the potty independently, that said,  it does entail a certain degree of risk. But I’m not averse to a bit of risk taking, so what the hell.

Babe was stood on the chair and some cake was undergoing the Kenwood whizzing treatment (she loves pressing the button on the food mixer). I roughly anticipated that she might be getting ready to emit the brown creation that she’s been working on over the last 24 hours, but my 6th senses are not that well honed on the timing bit yet. Anyways, I catch a whiff (in one of the rare moments that my sense of smell is working), and look round to see a big stinky dangler!

Quite relaxed (you know this is getting a bit routine for me), I pick her up and scuttle over to the potty in the hope that it holds strong. One foot away, and PLOP! On the carpet, grr!

How long is this potty training gonna take, was hoping to be home and dry for Christmas. Did you hear that sausage? Just a day to go?!

• Read more of our Pottyhood stories

Pottyhood Part 6: Out and About with the Travel Potty

During the busy Christmas shopping season, I cannot bear to take the buggy into town – it’s just way too busy, I rather use the baby carrier. The problem is, stowing things like a potty. Carrying a full sized chunk of pink plastic in addition to my toddler basics, and shopping is somewhat cumbersome to say the very least. I did it a couple of weeks ago and soon realized that there HAD to be a better way. Turns out there is and it comes in the form of a flat pack travel potty – this is IKEA furniture for the potty world.

The answer – a pottete
This is a wonderful invention which makes getting out and about with a little potty training person so much easier. You can literally whip it out of its bag, let babe do her business, bag it up and be off the crime scene in a matter of seconds – without the need for immediate disposal points (i.e. toilet). You can check out the full spec on Amazon if you’re curious.

I bought mine with bags  last week off eBay (the bags themselves seem to be quite pricey), and got it within a couple of days despite the bad weather. Over the weekend I had chance to give it a real test in a trip into town and over to the local supermarket and pet shop.

Imagine my excitement as babe shouts “wee wee” in the pet shop.
We scuttle over to the corner by the rabbit hutches, whip the beauty out and whalla, my little darling produces. We then break into our routine celebration dance of whooping and clapping, bag it up and we’re done.

Then it’s onto the supermarket to grab some basics to tide us over until we can get the car out of the snow. Yes I said snow, we’ve got even more this morning – there is no going anywhere today. Anyway, babe announces her wishes to go to the loo in the supermarket, so off we scamper to the loo – and nothing. This is usual, she often cries wolf – but I don’t know when that is, so we have to jump to action stations every time.

Then right down the other end of the store in the booze isle she pipes up “wee wee, potty”.  Argh blast, I’m thinking. There is no way I’m trawling through all these people right to the other end of the shop to realize that she went and did it in her nappy anyway. So out came the potette and my good little girl actually produced this time (luckily not the stinky brown stuff), but she made it worth my set-up efforts. 

You might ask if we got strange looks?
But I am now a master of mother/child discretion and made a nice little make shift privacy shield with the shopping trolley and my rucksack. Only those wanting a bottle of cider coming into close proximity would have caught onto what we were up too. That was until we gave the game away with our celebration dance – even one of the other shoppers joined in with a “well done” and claps.

I splashed out on the slightly more expensive version of the pottete that folds out into a toilet seat. I’m amazed that babe has already been successful with this too. I’m hoping that this won’t be in action for long, before babe gets the hang of dangling over the toilet seat. In the meantime, this will be my new best friend. The only problem, it’s slightly too large to go in my handbag and requires a separate bagging solution – hey ho, the hardships of motherhood

Did you like this post? Why not read some more in the Pottyhood series

The Zoo and Lots More Poo

It was babes second birthday this week – another typical day in the life of a toddler asserting her opinions, while enduring more challenges on the pottyhood journey.

We started off the day, with a few presents and cards, and explained to her that the delightful bike we’d given her a couple of months back was to celebrate this day – she didn’t care, she wanted to play ‘boats’.  

Chug chug chug…weeee!

 

 

Entering terrible two’s
She got the memo from her two year old friends.

“You are two, and with it goes the word ‘terrible’, you have an reputation to uphold – get to work girl.” 

 And with that, she got on with the job of running us ragged. At the same time, she was totally immune to my persuasive powers and deal brokering –  she was being as stubborn as an ass. So kicking and screaming I hauled her into the car seat, while hubby mumbled on, suggesting that my notion of going to the zoo was perhaps a bad idea.

Mama’s taking us to the zoo
Off we drove to Paignton Zoo (another must see destination if you’re holidaying in Devon), all the while the she was being a clingy nightmare and insisted on holding my hand for the full duration – or suffer the wails and the snot bubbles! So I figured a dead-arm from lost circulation as a result of twisting my arm round to the back seat while I sat in the front, was a reasonable price to pay.

Despite babe being clingy and insistent on me holding her hand or carrying her for the duration – we had a great time. We were cheated by the cheetah’s who were not out in their enclosure, but the lions, giraffes and elephant with their close encounters, more than made up for it. Despite taking the buggy, I carried babe in the baby Ergo for pretty much most of the time, and the buggy again was relegated to trolley duty.
 

Potty progress
Despite being out, a bit snotty and clingy, babe still used the potty throughout our trip – shame she didn’t before going in the bath with her new bath toys…

Just as she’d climbed into the tub, and I’d splashed all the new shiny CLEAN toys into the water, it dawned upon me that I’d forgotten to get her to have a potty moment prior. And in that instance a great big brown floater appeared alongside her, like a big brown walrus popping up for air. I’m accustomed to this practice and hauled her out onto the potty and quickly salvaged the boats.  After the clean up opp, we resumed, at long last she enjoyed a nice lengthy bath – an achievement compared to the 30 seconds of bathing that I’d been getting from her recently.

All in all, not a bad day. Here are a few more pictures:

Pottyhood Part 5: Carpet Crimes

It was bath time, and nappy-off-time. Babe was running around avoiding taking off her top and clamoring into the bath, so I let her quietly empty my bedside cabinet drawers again while I quickly rang my sister for a short  ‘what are we doing on Christmas day’ chat.

It started off like this:

ME “Hi B, how are you?”

B “Good thanks, and you?”

ME “Yeah, doing….o oh. Babe quick on the potty, sorry she’s crapped on the carpet”

Yes, my little potty training angel had pooped on the carpet after only a minute of putting her on the potty. The truth is I think she rather likes pooing standing up. Fortunate for me, the real messy end of it ended up in the potty.

My sister, not squeamish when it comes to poo-talk, had a running commentary of the experience. Of me trying to cajole babe off the potty and then gagging at the stink of the misplaced turd. Babe who felt rather proud of her part poo in the potty achievement, slipped back into the role of mother hen keeping her eggs warm. She was not keen on the idea of getting off the potty, and it was an excellent excuse to avoid going in the bath. Sheknows full well that I’m not going to tussle around with her when she’s sat on a stash load of potty deposits.

So there it was – our real dirty phone call.

Potttyhood Part 4 – Tea Time Favorites

WARNING NOTICE: If you don’t want to read about poo – don’t read on. I’m sorry if it seems I’m a bit obsessed, but this is a big part of my life right now.

Potty training is a dirty business, there’s no sugar coating it – but it’s all for a good end. On Monday night, the only way I was going to get fed was to sit on the floor with babe, as she sat on her potty keeping her #1 and #2 warm, while counting coins (as you may know, this is her #1 fave activity).

So you might be wondering why on earth why I was doing this. Well babe had been brewing up this pile up for a while, poor little thing didn’t know what to do with herself. Prior to actually getting on the potty and making the mountain, we’d had a few messy moments – not helpful while I was trying to finish off the mash potato for tea.

The time had come, she was ready and I’d got her to sit on the potty. The unfortunate thing was that once she had filled it up, she wanted to sit on it like a bird on her eggs. I didn’t want to really get into tussle, as I could see that getting REALLY messy. So I patiently sat next to her upon orders.

  “There” she hollered pointing to the carpet in front of her.  “Money” she yelled once I’d sat down. I duly grabbed her coin bucket and set to work as her assistant money counter.

Hubby who was grateful for my dedication to the cause got on, dished out tea and sat down to eat his. I attempted to go sit at the table to join him, but was called back by the sergeant major to stand guard, upon the bare bum bird keeping her stinking eggs warm.

Sod this I thought, I grabbed my tea, ate it one handedly, while counting money with her in the left hand – so thats my home life in a nutshell right now.

If you want to read previous pottyhood stories click on the links below:

• Pottyhood Part 1
• Pottyhood Part 2
• Pottyhood Part 3

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