not sponsored in any way by haagen dazs

Incidentally, this is how Alice has been spending a large chunk of her time: wearing a particular pair of pajamas on her head. We all have our own ways of coping.




This is what teething does to a person: it sends you off in a sweaty panic to the grocery store (Fred Meyer, the pretty one near our house), toddler in toe, to buy fruit juice for homemade ice pops (to cool the gums) - a brilliant idea, even in your current stressed-out crazy-making unbalanced state and you filled the internets in on this brilliant idea a couple of days ago. After grabbing not one but two bottles of juice, the teething propels you down the ice cream aisle, lovingly cradling a pint of Haagen Dazs Five: Brown Sugar. It has you stop and start to put the Haagen Dazs Five in your cart fifteen times. It has you finally tear yourself away from the Haagen Dazs Five only to stop two freezer doors down as you heavily contemplate frozen fruit bars with vanilla ice cream. OR very vanilla ice cream sandwiches. The teething forces you to walk three aisles over to traipse up and down past bags and bags of chips. Chips that you really don't want to buy. BUT YOU DO. YOU DO WANT TO BUY THEM. The teething is making you buy them! You say NO to the teething and go back to ice cream. Haggen Dazs actually makes its way into the shopping cart this time. It sits next to the diaper bag for two minutes before you put it back on the freezer shelf again, turning yourself and the cart in such a tight circle next to the mid-aisle Coke display that you actually get stuck there for a minute - the cart wedged between you, the freezer, and the four-foot stack of soda. The teething works hard on you. It has you walking over to the magazines. It makes you grab a magazine and put it in the cart. You leave the aisle without looking back. So you can walk through the ice cream one last time. You grab the box of vanilla ice cream-filled fruit bars. It's a compromise and a nod to the Haagen Dazs.

When you are finally loading grocery bags into your car, you review your purchases. Out of the one (fruit juice) or maybe two (hard pretzels) things that you intended to buy, you have also purchased fruit bars, two bags of grapes, a magazine, and some shaving gel. You realize that the teething craving grocery store run is the equivalent of a PMS grocery store run, only triple strength. Because you are fighting not only your self-medicating self-preservation instinct of DO WHATEVER, GET WHATEVER IS GOING TO HELP ME GET THROUGH THIS, but also your motherly desire to DO WHATEVER, GET WHATEVER IS GOING TO HELP ME HELP THE BABY THROUGH THIS. And really, it's not like the baby tells you what she needs. There are only vague guesses that pile up into mounds of hits and misses in your refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. You are stumbling in the dark - pulled along by the seething monster known as THE TEETHING.

Which is why you went to the store for one or two things. And you walked out with eight.

The teething is strong. You are powerless to the teething.

Get used to it.