The other day, I had a parenting moment.  Not one of those stellar look back upon and smile moments.  I do have those, but this wasn’t one of them.  I took three of the crew grocery shopping with me.  Sounds pretty innocuous, right?

I often think to myself, if only one child was having a bit of a time of it, I could be that sage parent with endless patience and the right answers.  It never seems to happen that way.  One child will do something: irritating, annoying, questionable, and/or dangerous.  I usually don’t get a chance to respond before another child swoops in to nag, beat, reprimand, swat, flick, give advice on what I need to do, or shoot foam darts at the offender. (I like to believe that they think they are being helpful, despite the multitude of times I have told them that it is not being helpful).  More often than not a third child will join the fray and my sageness jumps ship and all I want is for the chaos to stop.  Throw that chaos into a trip to the grocery store to grab a couple of things and ta da!  You have the combined elements of a parental mental melt down.  In that moment, all my parenting tools abandon ship and my focus narrows to ‘Just make it stop’ and ‘Help me survive until we get out the door’.  I am pretty sure that no one within a 20 metre radius wasn’t positive that I was going to duct tape my children together and runaway chortling maniacally.  It sometimes amazes me that I haven’t yet, but that is when I remember the other moments.