Grocery Store Misadventures, Part II

Now that yesterday's introduction has been given, I can jump right into my story.  As I was planning for my next grocery trip, I saw that Meijer (our grocery store) was offering a $10 off total purchase e-coupon good for Thursday only.  I had wanted to grocery shop on Wednesday, a day that I have off, but I just couldn't pass up the coupon.  I work on Thursdays from 8-5; it was a long day and I came home with a headache.  Thankfully, Billy already had dinner just about ready.  Now rarely will Maryn and I go to the grocery store without Billy.  We usually have a pretty long list of things to buy so that we don't have to go as often.  But Billy had been with Maryn all day while I was at work, and he really needed to get some school work done.  He asked if I wanted him to go along, but I assured him, I can do this, my list is well organized, I know exactly what I need, you stay here and get some work done.  He took Maryn out to the car for me, got the stroller out of the trunk so I'd have more grocery space, and we said goodbye.

Traffic was bad, but we made it to Meijer.  It had been snowing, and the parking lot was sludgy and gross. Maryn is at an in between phase where she's getting heavy and it's hard to lug her car seat around, but she's not quite big enough to sit in the grocery basket seat.  Plus, the car seat cover keeps her warmer than she'd be if I took her out of the car seat and carried her into the store.  Every time I get the car seat out of the back of the car, my lower back starts to spasm, and then my arms ache as I carry her.  We made our way through the slush and into the store, and I situated her car seat in the front of the cart.

I had a strategy for getting through the store as quickly as possible, and my list was organized accordingly. Pharmacy, home organization, baby, produce, bread, dry goods, dairy, meat, frozen.  I was running low on prenatal vitamins and DHA, and I had an e-coupon; in addition, Meijer was having a buy-one-get-one-free deal on all vitamins.  Score!  The vitamin aisle is huge at Meijer, and only certain brands qualified for the special.  I swear I spent at least 20 minutes on that aisle; I just couldn't find what I needed!  I finally had to ask for help.  Turns out, all of the prenatals were sold out, and DHA was on a separate aisle and did not qualify, not to mention it was way more expensive than at Wal-Mart or Target. What a waste of time!  I left empty handed and moved on.

I made it to the produce section.  I had a lot of produce on my list.  I really like Meijer's produce - they have a much better selection than other stores - you can get just about anything, and they even have a large fresh herb section.  But it's a really big area with lots of aisles.  It took forever to find and individually bag each item I needed.  I had two things left: I was going to try a new recipe that called for fresh ginger and scallions.  I use ground ginger all the time, but I had no idea what it actually looks like in its original state.  And I didn't even know what a scallion was.  I just knew they were in there somewhere!  After spending 20 minutes going up and down the aisles, reading every single tiny label of each item, I finally found a Meijer employee, a big 20ish guy who didn't look like he was enjoying his job much.  "Can you please tell me where to find scallions?"  He looked at me like I was a total idiot.  "Scallions are the same things as green onions.  They're over there," he pointed.  Oh, well I know what a green onion is and I've passed them a dozen times.  Embarrassed, I said, "What about fresh ginger?"  He picked up this weird root looking thing right next to him.  When he saw my look of dismay he said, "We have chopped ginger in a jar right here." Umm, thanks.  I grabbed the onions and the jar and rushed off.

By this time I'm sweating in my down snow boots and my big down coat.  I peeled off my coat and put it in the basket.  Then my cart started acting up; the wheel kept sticking and it felt like I was running in place just to get it moving.  I moved onto the bread aisle.  Meijer was having a special - buy a loaf of bread, get hotdog buns and hamburger buns for free!  This was great because I needed all three.  But guess what?  It took forever to find the brand/varieties that qualified.   Once again, too many choices and too much time spent trying to find the right things so I could get the bargain.  I was starting to get angry, and my head was pounding.  I finally found the right items.

Then I looked down at Maryn, who had been playing with her toy keys and squealing happily this whole time, and she's covered in white string!  She had gotten ahold of the gauze wrapped around her head under the outer bandage, and she was pulling it to shreds!  She had string entwined around all her fingers, and there was string all in her mouth.  I frantically started pulling string from her slobbery mouth, trying to get the bandage situated back on her head.  That was the last straw.  Thank God Maryn wasn't fussy.  If she had started to cry, I think I would have too.  I was going to have to cut this trip short.  As I zipped through the frozen section on my way to check out, I saw that the Meijer brand sundae cones were on sale.  Hmm, I deserve that after this trip.  I grabbed a box and headed to a check out aisle.  As I waited in line, I sent Billy a text that said, "Disaster. Coming home."

Of course, this horrid trip wasn't worth it if I didn't get that $10 discount.  So as the cashier is running everything up, I asked her to please confirm that I did indeed get the discount.  She just stared at me and blinked, like she had no idea what I was talking about.  I start to sweat again.  I explained the e-coupon two times and she said she had no idea how to tell whether or not the discount was applied.  So she called her manager.  Thankfully, the manager was like, "It shows you right here (dummy)!" and I did indeed get the $10 off.  So Maryn and I bundled back up, I pushed my increasingly difficult to manage cart through the slush and snow, and I loaded Maryn and the groceries in the car and went home.

Epilogue: After Billy helped me unload everything, we sat down to relax with our Thursday night TV shows and eat those sundae cones.  They were disgusting.  The bottoms of the cones were broken off, the ice cream tasted cheap, and the cones were soft.  Gross!  And there were only 4 in a box!  I guess they weren't as good of a deal as I had thought.  Billy and I decided they weren't worthy of our freezer, so we needed to go ahead and finish them off.  :)  Then I wanted to look at my receipt to see how much money I had saved, and to plan for my 2nd trip to finish the job on Saturday.  To my dismay, I saw that the cashier had charged me for 11 bunches of those blasted green onions/scallions instead of one!  I think she actually counted how many onions were in one bunch and charged for each!

So today I returned to the store by myself.  I got my money back for the green onion mistake, and I got everything else I needed on my list.  Of course a Saturday afternoon is probably the busiest time to go to the store, but it turned out all right, and with both trips combined I ended up saving $35 (child's play for you expert couponers out there, but pretty good for me).  And thankfully, I shouldn't have to go back for a while.

I think the lesson God wants me to learn in all this is that I am limited.  I'll never be a super-mom, and that's okay.  Next time I'll ask for help.  And maybe try to keep my emotions under control when things don't go the way I had planned.  How do moms do it with multiple children?!  I guess each kid comes with extra grace provided from the Lord.  Makes me thankful for my own mom as I remember many a frazzled grocery store trip with us three kids - we sure didn't make things any easier for her!  :)