Today, we needed goats' milk. No big deal, we'd just do school collection in car and pop to Tesco from there.
Only when we arrived at school, Little Lady was in floods of tears for no real reason. Not to worry, probably just overtired from sports day. She'd surely just doze off in the car and awake refreshed.
As we traipsed around the aisles, me pretending I remembered what we needed, Little One was doing serious coughing from his seat in the trolley. I put aside my calculations of how much time we had before Littlest needed a feed and tried to work out the odds of making it through the evening without a visit to the out of hours doctor.
I vaguely noticed that Little Lady was coughing too.
Tin foil! We definitely needed tin foil!
Gosh that cough was bad. Recalculate doctor visit odds.
What the -? Little Lady had coughed so hard she threw up. On the floor. Mid-aisle.
Tears. Cuddles.
Crap. Littlest was stirring in the sling.
Mad dash to checkout.
Rush back for tin foil.
Actually checkout.
Success! Now just to get the four kids and the shopping into the car. A 7-seater.
A 7-seater with precious little space left after you add four kids, two school bags, one buggy and a package from the post office.
By this stage Littlest was tired and hungry. And not shy about letting me know.
All previous calculations abandoned in order to work out how long I could spend feeding him in the front seat, before our frozen purchases thawed in 20 degree heat.
Forfeited our €1 in the trolley to save precious moments.
Paused at the car door.
Paused to listen to the lady who had come over just to tell me she thought I was amazing. That it's tough enough for her to shop with two kids and there I was, doing a great job with four.
Kind lady, I am not amazing. I promise you that I'm not even close. Like you, like everyone, I am simply muddling through one day at a time, and hoping the day contains more kiddie cuddles than kiddie tears.
But to take the time to walk up to a stranger, one who might be just about to succumb to stress, and to say 'Well done, you're doing great. Keep it up', well that's pretty amazing in my book.
Thank you.
