So yesterday I’m at the supermarket (by myself … monumental), and as I slowly wheeled my way down the bread aisle, a woman came flying toward me from the other direction. She was clearly in a flustered hurry, and her much less frantic tween daughter moseyed along behind her, pushing the shopping cart.
I stopped briefly to choose a bag of hamburger buns and left my cart a few feet away. The tween, most likely not paying full attention, crashed into it with her own cart. Her mother, Mrs. Flustery Whirlwind, got annoyed. “Watch where you’re going,” she said through her teeth.
“I am,” answered Tween, as all Tweens do.
Mrs. Whirlwind continued her frantic search for whatever. Tween, again most likely oblivious, crashed into my cart with hers a second time.
“That’s it!” barked Whirlwind. “We’re switching! Push this one!” And she proceeded to grab the shopping cart and give her daughter the handles of what she’d been pushing (I havent even noticed, in the eye of the tornado) …. an umbrella stroller with a sleeping baby in it.
(Um, Lady? Pardon me for noticing, but at least the cart Tweenie was pushing wasn’t alive. You got angry because she kept ramming into things with it. So you decided to give her the baby, fully exposed in the front of the stroller, to ram into stuff? Interesting move).
As I followed the family to the end of the aisle, I found it hard to stifle my not-so-quiet laughter. Frustrating parenting situations are somehow funny when you’re without your own children.
Normally I am very empathetic to and non-judgmental of parents of all kinds … But I’m sorry, this was just too funny for me to feel badly for Whirlwind. Slightly sorry for the poor kid in the stroller, though …
The World of Author/Mom Alicia Murphy! 
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