DOWN THE AISLE

The children always went to the grocery store with me. Given a choice, I would have left them at home, but single parents do not have that luxury.

Actually this first event occurred while I was married to the children's father but he traveled a lot so I might as well have been a single parent even then. My son and daughter were 15 months apart. Tandy, my son, was about two and and Chelle, nine months old, when we strolled through the store doing about a month's worth of shopping. The baby rode in the basket while I pushed the basket with one hand and held onto my son with the other. Suddenly Tandy wanted in the overfilled basket and when I explained there was no room, he sat down in the aisle and began to kick and scream. That was it. He refused to budge or be quiet. What's a mother to do? I took his arm and drug him screaming down every aisle of the store. We got our shopping done and he dusted the store floors with his butt. Today someone would have turned me in for child abuse.

The next aisle story was a quickie. Chelle was about three when she heard me say pickles were on the list. I turned in time to see her lifting one of those jumbo jars of whole pickles. The jar was almost as big as Chelle. It slipped through her tiny little hands and pickle brine and huge, fat Vlasic's went tumbling all over the aisle.

Then they day came that Chelle has always describes as the most embarrassing moment of her life. She had to be about five and her brother six. Tandy had violent allergies to a certain red food dye and I had to watch his diet very carefully. That day at school he had managed to eat a cupcake at a friend's birthday party that was filled with the dreaded dye. It hit him in the grocery store and without warning, he began to spew in the grocery store aisle. I had to rush him outside and left little Chelle to -- you guessed it -- guard the vomit. When I returned to the store to take care of the mess, there stood my humiliated little girl waving people around the puddle and politely telling them "Be careful. My brother puked." "Watch your step. My brother puked."

The store manager assured us they would take care of the mess and we could just leave. We hear the booming announcement as we walked out, "CLEAN UP ON AISLE FIVE!"