Aimee Ogden, “Winter Grocery Shopping With Toddlers Is The Tenth Circle Of Hell” (2015)

“Grocery shopping with toddlers isn’t that much fun to begin with, but throw some -10ºF temperatures into the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for hell on earth. Frigid, snowy weather on grocery day is almost enough to convince me we’ll somehow manage to survive on a few cans of button mushrooms and a jar of olives until the next week.

“Besides trying to corral tiny people who have mastered the art of ‘walking’ but not so much the art of ‘walking without careening into every other person/cart/carefully laid out pyramid of soup cans in the store’, the main problem with winter grocery shopping with small children is that it presents a series of obnoxious choices.

“It would be faster for me to list the things toddlers don’t like to grab at than to list things they do. The reason that this is faster is because that list has exactly zero entries. Can you manage a grocery trip without going down any aisles with glass jars or bottles? To me, going to the grocery store with the kids usually means skipping a trip to the beer section, and as a Wisconsin resident, you can imagine how difficult this is. Especially considering how much I’m going to need a beer by the time I get home.

“If you find yourself stuck with toddlers, an empty pantry, and sub-Arctic temperatures, I wish you all the best luck. (You’ll need it.) And remember, spring is only a few weeks away–so either you only have a few more hellish grocery trips in store, or you can try to hold out till then with that half-bag of potato chips, elbow macaroni, and box of Cheez-Its in your cupboard.”    – Aimee Ogden, Mommyish, February 23, 2015

Related Sighting

Beth Wolfensberger Singer, “The nine concentric circles of New England winter hell” (2016)