Shopping alone?

Shopping with two young children? You would think that shopping carts would be more accommodating for more than one young child. I guess stores would expect a two year old to walk along side, but when your two year old doesn’t walk and you have a 5 month old…what can you do? I pray.


A couple weeks ago, Luke and his baby sister and I left early enough for his Speech Therapy to get a few groceries at Meijers. It was the first time attempting to take them both on my own. So I prayed that I could easily find one of those carts I had seen there before, the ones with the bench extension. Well, I was so happy to see one of those outside in the cart rack in the parking lot. I thought I had it made, I even found a parking place right next to the cart rack.

The shopping went well, and I thought “all right I think I can do this”. Then our shopping was done and we went back out to the car. I loaded Luke in first and then went to get the infant carrier out of the cart, and found it to be stuck. I tried and tried and couldn’t get the latch to unlock from the cart. So here I am in the parking lot, now running late for therapy and tipping my baby girl in her car seat at different angles trying to get the latch to unlock. Then, of course, Luke starts crying and the baby girl starts crying. I’m sure someone was walking by wondering what I was doing to my poor children.

Anyway, I finally figured out I would probably need to flip the seat upside down in order for it to unlock. I debated for about 10 seconds leaving my girl in the seat while doing this, then thought better of it. So I took her blanket, laid it in the bottom of the cart, took my baby girl out of her car seat, laid her on the blanket, and then flipped the seat upside down. It finally popped out and unlocked!!! Only I wasn’t done, I still had to strap my baby girl back into her car seat so we could leave.

After packing her back up we finally we able to leave. By some miracle we were only 6 minutes late for therapy. After that experience I have been extra careful in how I place the baby’s car seat into a shopping cart. Who knew it could be so hard just to get the car seat out of the cart?