Shopping with the brat
Those who try to shop alone with an 18 month old are brave souls. Unless I really, really have to, I will never do that again.
Under the clothes rack
Emma was all over the place. She could not sit still in her stroller. Each time we stopped at a store, she wanted to go down. In some stores it was alright but not in others. First of all I was shopping in one of those outdoor malls, people around her calls it The Plaza, and since it was kind of nice outside, some stores had the door open. So besides Emma running through every single clothes rack there was also a good chance of her running outside. Now I did try to hold her when she would not stop pulling shirts off the rack. It use to work really well because she liked mommy carrying her around. But no, she wanted to get down. She wiggled and wiggled and when she couldn’t get down, her little temper came out and she started hitting my face and pulling my hair. After a few threats, useless threats, Emma received her first public very discrete spanking on the thigh. Yeah, I made sure nobody saw…. didn’t want social services to come after me. But I think the spanking mostly hurt her ego than anything else. She screamed of course but after calming down, she listened to everything I said.
I mean for the most part she was pretty cute. She was prancing around, laughing, dancing, and zig zagging from one rack to the other, hiding in between the clothes but at the same time it was nerve wrecking.
Then in another store I was standing in line to pay. Emma was playing in the dressing room. Since it was the Children’s Place the dressing room was kids friendly and Emma was having a lot of fun admiring herself and checking out the different feet on the floor. Then I heard somebody say, “look, she’s butt naked.” Without looking I knew that was my child that person was referring to. Sure enough, I looked and there was Emma running out of the dressing room with her butt wagging back and forth. I called her name, she stopped, gave me a smirk, and ran off while laughing. I chased after her and tried to put on another diaper but that didn’t get me anywhere. So I pulled out the training pants and that was another fight. One foot in the other foot out. She wasn’t too happy with me but I managed to win that battle.
There were more but those were the highlights. It was tiring. My two-hour-plan went to four hours. URGH! No more. Well I guess now it doesn’t matter. I’m on a buying freeze till after Christmas. We have a no buying anything for ourselves two months before our birthdays and christmas rule. Unfortunately for me my birthday is in October. So last weekend was my last weekend to shop.