Monday, February 01, 2010

Clean-Up on Aisle 6!

Caitlin and I headed over to a little discount grocery store in Dacono this morning. The poor girl has fluid in her lungs, and sounds like an asthmatic jogger most of the time. Today was spent keeping her away from other kids.

The grocery store was a fun find. I'm a bargain hunter. I'm currently wearing my 1 cent hoodie from Macy's that I bought a couple of summers ago. I've found a couple more 1 cent bargains at Macy's, but I guess the cashiers aren't suppose to sell them for that price. Oh well. Anyway, this grocery store was very much like Grocery Outlet in California. I got power bars for 50 cents, Pirates Booty for a dollar a bag, and our favorite snacking cereals by Kashi for only $1.75 a box (they're usually at least $3.50 per box, which I refuse to pay!). I was pleasantly surprised to find my favorite laundry detergent, Bi-O-Kleen, at $2.75 for 64 ounces. This chemical free, environmentally friendly liquid is usually priced between $9.50 at King Soopers, to $12-14 at Whole Foods and other natural grocery stores. I quickly snapped up 2. About 10 minutes later, as I was walking down the pasta and cracker aisle, I noticed my shoes sliding on the linoleum. As I looked down to see what on earth was so squishy, I saw this.....
 

Lovely. Some form of liquid spilled all over the floor. Then I looked in my cart and saw one of the Bi-O-Kleen bottles flipped over completely. Lid off. Detergent everywhere. And I mean everywhere! All over the cereal. All over the power bars. All over the food, the cart, the floor..... everywhere except the girl. Caitlin! She was making towers of food  in the cart and then destroying them. She'd somehow managed to knock over the detergent and dislodge the cap, or was using the bottle as a wrecking ball. I'm not sure which one it was. About a third of the bottle poured out. The only reason that the entire bottle hadn't poured all over the floor was because it got caught in her shoe that she had taken off sometime after going to the store.  Her entire shoe was filled with Bi-O-Kleen.  I poured it back into the bottle.


I managed to maintain my composure, mostly because it's frowned upon to yell in stores, and ran up to the closest cashier to get some paper towels and a clean-up on aisle 6. It is seriously all I can do not to scream at the top of my lungs sometimes. Why is this girl so difficult to take shopping?  Ugh!!! This is not a new thing - she's been awful in stores since birth. Last summer she managed to pull a shopping cart on top of her in Sprouts after only being in the store for 10 minutes (for your information, the cage-free brown eggs did much better after a 10 foot launch than the regular white shelled eggs).  I love her dearly, but I'd love to just be able to leave her in the car, too. It was so embarrassing today. Not only did I have to call for a clean-up, but the poor man had to get two mop buckets, one with more water, to help him get the soap off the floor (should be really clean, though). I used half a roll of paper towels mopping up all the slimy detergent on the boxes. Then, I had to check-out and pay for my slightly slimy goods. No liquid seeped through anything, but it was a pain to clean-up. Caitlin at this point had no shoes, so we could only go straight home. On top of it all, she was really upset that she didn't get a gumball from the machine in the front of the store. I guess in my haste to leave I forgot that I'd said she could have one. *Sigh* She got over it a few miles down the road.

I did a load of laundry after we got home. My jacket, Caitlin's sweatshirt, and her shoes were coated with a layer of soap. I didn't have to add any to the water, though. I'm not sure her shoes will survive this. They're currently drying in front of the fireplace, and still feel slimy inside. It took about 10 trips to the sink (without any additional soap, mind you!) to finally feel like I'd washed the detergent off of my hands. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now, but grocery shopping is just not one of those things you can cut out of your life. I'm not looking forward to summer, when I have both kids all the time. Maybe I should hire a babysitter for my grocery shopping days.

Just for a visual, here's what I have left of my 64 ounce bottle:

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