Another toddler story while I’m at it.
A half dozen or so years ago, circumstances were such that my teenage daughter was pushing me around in a manual wheelchair at Costco. At one point, something caught her eye and she gave me a bit of a push forward and parked me mid-aisle to go look at it.
At the same time, a dad pushing a cart with his little boy in it did the same thing and stepped over to the opposite side of the aisle. And so I found myself on a Saturday afternoon suddenly looking up at this toddler who might have been barely two, with his seatbelt on, a big boy now who didn’t need an infant seat anymore.
I smiled and waved hi.
There was this look of absolute bewilderment on the kid’s face, and you could totally read his mind as he stared:
There’s a grownup! In a stroller! Being pushed by…a KID!
Blew his mind. It took him a moment to decide whether it was okay to wave back: wave, oh, right, I remember waving, um, okay. And so he gave me this very funny half-wave with this expression of, I GUESS I should.
And then there was the time I used Costco’s motorized chair, and at the far end of the store, it suddenly stopped dead. The battery indicator read fully charged, but hey, try to tell it that. My hubby went to go grab the manager, and when the guy came over, he took in the scene and told us, “The problem is it’s thrown the dead man switch. You’re too lightweight. It doesn’t think anyone’s there. Put your purse in your lap, maybe a ten pound bag of rice or something so it knows there’s someone actually sitting there.”
That’s me. Always messing with their minds.