This just happened to me an hour ago in the grocery store.<\/p>\n
I was standing in an aisle, deliberating over granola bars while the three small people, all wound up from school and so forth, played one of their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153shuffle around in an odd manner and draw as much attention to us as possible\u00e2\u20ac\u009d games around the cart. I was tired, and was trying to focus on my purchase so I could get us all out of the store as quickly as possible. A man who looked to be in his early twenties was standing a few feet away from us, deliberating over his own items.<\/p>\n
Then, he looked at me and asked, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You do this all the time?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and nodded at the small people.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I laughed, slightly puzzled.<\/p>\n
He shook his head. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Amazing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he mumbled with a faint grin, and walked away.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really sure how to take this, because there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an ounce of maliciousness in his tone, but there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a sympathetic \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bless your heart\u00e2\u20ac\u009d added to the comment either.<\/p>\n
As I turned the corner, I walked by a display filled with bottles of Shiraz that were on sale. This I took as an alignment of the stars (tired + obscured meaning comment + wine on sale = aligned stars), so I helped myself to one.<\/p>\n
Then, as I headed toward the checkout, I spotted a father probably in his mid-forties, with three kids himself, two that looked to be in upper elementary school or middle school, and one who was a toddler. We had entered the store at the same time, and the toddler had been screaming, quite literally.<\/p>\n
This was ten minutes later, and the toddler was still screaming. And you could see, the dad was handling it heroically, but he was weary from battle.<\/p>\n
He finished checking out right before me, and I started walking with my cart a few feet behind him, the small people around me talking excitedly about opening up some of the snacks when we got home. Abruptly, he stopped, and turned around, as if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d forgotten something.<\/p>\n
It was the look he gave me. It was brief, but you could tell, he saw me as anything but the frazzled mother, the kids as anything but mischievous children.<\/p>\n
I guess it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This just happened to me an hour ago in the grocery store. I was standing in an aisle, deliberating over granola bars while the three small people, all wound up from school and so forth, played one of their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153shuffle around in an odd manner and draw as much attention to us as possible\u00e2\u20ac\u009d games […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[80,482,543,545,105,100,465,544],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-island-parenting","tag-beach-life","tag-beach-living","tag-grocery-shopping-with-kids","tag-i-do-mothering-all-the-time","tag-island-life","tag-island-living","tag-island-mom","tag-strange-comments-strangers-make"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}