Grocery Store Fiasco
Rating: G
Timeline: 2017
Summary: Ben takes the triplets to the grocery store. Chaos ensues.
Later, when all three kids are finally upstairs napping and he’s collapsed on the couch, Ben will wonder why he was so optimistic about a quick trip to the grocery store, just him and the triplets.
When Leslie’s rubbing the knots in his shoulders and it feels so amazingly good, he’ll decide that he should definitely have just stayed at home with the kids while Roz was sick with the flu and his wife was busy with meetings, and not tried to go on a field trip.
But a couple of hours before all of this happens-before Leslie’s backrub and her soothing concern, Ben is feeling very good about everything.
To start, he can’t believe his luck when he pulls the mini-van into the parking lot and right away sees one of those shopping carts with the small plastic car attached to the front, just few steps from the mini-van. The kind with seats for two down below and one up in the traditional child’s seat-it’s like it was made for triplets. Noisy, adorable, monster-triplets like his and Leslie’s almost-three year olds.
“Alright, who wants to drive a car?” Ben asks the backseat and gets eager responses like “yay!” and “cookies!” and other giggly screams that don’t really resemble words that he can make out. He smiles regardless, happy that everyone seems on board with this quick shopping plan. And really, everything does go super smoothly at first.
Ben gets everyone settled (stuffed animals included) in the over-sized cart, and he easily grabs the milk and some chicken breasts for dinner-he even avoids going down the candy aisle and having the kids shout out for chocolate. And really, the only thing that gets added impulsively is when Sonia reaches for a box of crackers off the shelf because they are, “BoBo’s favorite.”
It’s just when he checks on the boys after adding some granola to the cart (along with Leslie’s preferred sugar-loaded cereal that he figures they’ll need to start hiding soon), that he glances down and notices that he only has one son.
Shit.
“Stephen?” Ben calls out, standing up quickly to look around the cereal aisle, before crouching down again. “Wes, where did your brother go?”
“Daddy, get carrots,” his other son calmly requests, seemingly unconcerned about his missing sibling. Ben stands back up and starts wheeling the cart down the aisles that they’ve previously been, looking for his little lost triplet.
He couldn’t have gone that far, right?
As they pass the produce section, Wesley is now full-on yelling for carrots, so Ben grabs the closest vegetable-corn on the cob, and hands it to his son, hoping that it will appease him for just a bit while he searches for Stephen.
Next, there’s a brief stop in the deli aisle so Ben can ask an employee if he’s seen a small, three-foot tall boy in a blue and green plaid shirt.
No such luck.
“Whoa, dude,” the young staffer says, before Ben can wheel away. “Your kid just ate a big handful of blue cheese.”
“Wait, what?” Ben crouches down to look at Wesley, who is obliviously playing with his corn cob, and then back up. “No, he has some corn. What are you-”
“No, not that one. That one,” he says, pointing to Sonia.
Ben’s eyes widen as he examines his daughter. “Sonia, did you eat-”
“Cheese!” she finishes for him, and then adds “stinky,” with a bit of regret.
Before he can even start to deal with the cheese crisis (not to mention the bigger missing-son crisis), he hears his name.
“Ben? Ben Wyatt?”
He turns around and of course it’s…Shauna Malwae-Tweep, which Ben supposes is at least better than Joan Callamezzo.
Shauna’s smiling and holding a hand basket filled with a couple of bottles of wine and two steaks, which in comparison to his own cart which includes items like training pants, cereal, milk, and stuffed ostrich-approved crackers, makes Ben just a bit nostalgic. He can remember the days of buying just a few groceries for a quiet dinner in, just him and Leslie.
And for the briefest of seconds, he also lets himself recall kissing Shauna Malwae-Tweep in a parking lot, that night long ago, when the world didn’t end and later, Leslie knocking on his door impatiently and promising to not get in the way of his and Shauna’s future children.
Ben holds in a laugh at both the irony and also one of his wife’s only successful attempts at being sneaky.
“Shauna, hi. Hi there. Have you seen Stephen?”
“Is he one of your-”
“Yeah. He escaped,” Ben explains quickly, feeling a lot calmer than he actually is-quite honestly, he’s nearing panic-mode at this point. “I just…” Ben trails off and squints behind Shanuna after something catches his eye-a little flash of plaid and a small hand inside the dairy case windows.
Seriously?
“Um, hey, Shauna, could you, um, watch these two for just a second? I think I found him.”
Ben hardy waits for a response before he rushes towards the milk, easily finding a propped open door to the cooler and there Stephen is, trying to pull a gallon of 2% off the shelf and onto his head. He’s instantly filled with relief but then also panic again as Stephen manages to budge the large, heavy container just a bit.
“Stop,” he says quickly, running over to reach his son-his curious, sweets-obsessed, goofy little boy. The one that he secretly thinks takes after Leslie the most.
“Stephen, you scared me,” Ben says, picking up and holding his son tightly.
He walks back out into the main area of the store and sets Stephen down just briefly enough to take off his own jacket off and wrap it around the boy, before kneeling down and hugging him again, this time to try and warm him up.
“Cows!” Stephen shouts gleefully. “Cold cows daddy! No ice cream. I want a cookie plate, please.”
“No, honey. There are no cows at the grocery store. Just milk. And no ice cream or cookies. Hey,” Ben tugs on his sons little hands gently to get his attention, before leaning in and first kissing his forehead. “Listen. Please don’t wander off again,” he says and then notices Shauna looking over, notebook in hand. Ben sighs. “Hey, thanks for-”
“Oh, no problem. Glad he turned up so quickly.”
“Yeah. Me too,” he answers and honestly, Ben would never trade his shopping cart for one like hers even if he could. He loves his noisy, messy, completely bonkers shopping cart more than anything.
After getting Stephen back safely in the lower part of the cart, behind the fake steering wheel and right next to Wesley (and his brother’s pet corn cob that is now apparently named carrot-Bob), Ben turns his attention to his daughter and her smelly, sticky hands. Cute, adorable little hands that normally he would kiss and pretend to eat and smile at her giggles and squeals but now, hands that kind of make him want to shudder.
Why couldn’t she have eaten a bunch of cheddar samples?
“How do you feel, Sonia?” he asks softly, pushing some of her blonde hair off her face. “Is your tummy okay?”
Ben sighs in relief as she nods at him, seemingly unaffected from the god knows how many blue cheese crumbles she managed to scarf down. At least there were no tooth picks to slow her down or poke an eye out, Ben thinks gratefully.
It’s a fast trip back through the aisles, the closest route to the checkout area being aisle three, when one triplet, (he thinks it’s Wesley), starts to sing and yell out the Turtle Song.
Except, the typical driving force behind the turtle song is Leslie, usually during bath time and without her, the kids just remember the main parts-turtle jeans! poop beans! Toes! Knees! which they shout out and laugh at, all while asking him to sing along.
But mainly, and unsurprisingly he supposes, it’s the poop beans part they seem most fond of.
“Poop turtles!” Wesley adds once for good measure, and then breaks into loud laughter and squeals, before quietly saying, “uh-oh.”
They’ve started working on potty training at home, so Ben has a pretty good idea what uh-oh means. He shuts his eyes and rubs his forehead.
“Sing with us, daddy!” Sonia demands again.
“Oh, I think maybe we should wait until we get home,” he tells them, relieved that the self-checkout is empty and clear.
Minutes later, he manages to leave the store with one bag of groceries, all three kids, and maybe three-fifths of his dignity, his nerves only slightly frayed.
Once in the mini-van, Ben begins to finally relax. Everyone is safe, they have milk and things for dinner. Maybe this was okay?
He continues to assume that the drive home will be fairly uneventful, which of course, is the exact moment he hears Sonia start to cry. They’re on a quiet street just two blocks from the house, so Ben turns briefly to look and is just in time to see his adorable, little blonde daughter projectile-vomit all over the backseat.
“Daddy,” she cries out afterwards and Ben manages to pull over quickly, grab some napkins from the glove compartment, and get out of the car. When he gets the back door open, she seems to be done throwing up, but of course both her and the back seat are covered in partially digested blue cheese crumbles…and no one present was wearing a poncho.
Thankfully, both Wesley and Stephen seem too shocked to cry and moderately un-hit in terms of the mess.
“Oh, sweetie, are you okay?” It seems like a silly question, but Ben is not sure where else to start.
He gently uses the napkins to clean her off the best he can for now, and then stinky cheese smell be damned, he unbuckles her from the car seat and picks her up, hugging her tight, all while she cries and says his name.
“Shhh, you’re okay. I don’t blame you. Blue cheese is gross. You’re okay,” he repeats, already running through his head all the foods that thirty-two month olds can safely eat, relieved to remember that blue cheese is definitely on the list. “We’ll get you home and cleaned up. It’s okay. Are you okay? Does your tummy hurt now?” He’s rubbing her back while she snuggles her face against his shoulder.
“I’m okay daddy,” she answers finally, with just the barest trace of a sniffle.
Ben gets her buckled back in and is about to shut the door when Wesley holds up his hand and proudly says, “Daddy look!”
He decides to deal with the stolen candy bars tomorrow.
Once safely inside the house, it seems easier to just give all three kids a bath to make sure the cheese mishap is fully dealt with. So, everyone except him is naked and mostly clean and thankfully, the only other situation was when Wesley tried unsuccessfully to flush his socks down the toilet. But now, wet and soapy, the triplets seems almost as tired as he is.
He’s hoping that they’ll be easy to get down for an hour or two after he gets them out of the tub, so he can try to do some work. Or set fire to the mini-van, Ben hasn’t quite decided yet.
He does, however, decide to end bath time with the earlier-requested turtle song.
“Turtles wear jeans and they poop out beans, they don’t wear clothes when they wash between their…” he pauses, letting Sonia, Wesley, and Stephen do their part and respond, “toes!” as each child reaches down into the water to touch their toes.
Ben laughs and continues. “They climb up a tree, even though they don’t have…”
“Knees!”
“Okay, now let’s get everyone out of the tub and ready for nap time, okay?”
“Okay, daddy,” come the sleepy, easy responses.
When Leslie comes home and finds him on the couch a bit later, he’s exhausted for sure, but also content-especially when she tells him she’s not going back to work that afternoon.
No wait, content is not quite the right word, super-fucking-relieved is more like it.
And if Shauna does write something about the grocery store fiasco, he’s pretty sure he and Jen can probably spin this as an example of his good crisis management skills.
The whole episode actually reminds Ben that whenever he and Leslie are together and a unified team, they are just better at everything, whether it’s a city council campaign, a congressional campaign, eating a crazy amount of French macarons, or attempting a family grocery store outing.
Also…they really need to give Roz a raise.
Timeline: 2017
Summary: Ben takes the triplets to the grocery store. Chaos ensues.
Later, when all three kids are finally upstairs napping and he’s collapsed on the couch, Ben will wonder why he was so optimistic about a quick trip to the grocery store, just him and the triplets.
When Leslie’s rubbing the knots in his shoulders and it feels so amazingly good, he’ll decide that he should definitely have just stayed at home with the kids while Roz was sick with the flu and his wife was busy with meetings, and not tried to go on a field trip.
But a couple of hours before all of this happens-before Leslie’s backrub and her soothing concern, Ben is feeling very good about everything.
To start, he can’t believe his luck when he pulls the mini-van into the parking lot and right away sees one of those shopping carts with the small plastic car attached to the front, just few steps from the mini-van. The kind with seats for two down below and one up in the traditional child’s seat-it’s like it was made for triplets. Noisy, adorable, monster-triplets like his and Leslie’s almost-three year olds.
“Alright, who wants to drive a car?” Ben asks the backseat and gets eager responses like “yay!” and “cookies!” and other giggly screams that don’t really resemble words that he can make out. He smiles regardless, happy that everyone seems on board with this quick shopping plan. And really, everything does go super smoothly at first.
Ben gets everyone settled (stuffed animals included) in the over-sized cart, and he easily grabs the milk and some chicken breasts for dinner-he even avoids going down the candy aisle and having the kids shout out for chocolate. And really, the only thing that gets added impulsively is when Sonia reaches for a box of crackers off the shelf because they are, “BoBo’s favorite.”
It’s just when he checks on the boys after adding some granola to the cart (along with Leslie’s preferred sugar-loaded cereal that he figures they’ll need to start hiding soon), that he glances down and notices that he only has one son.
Shit.
“Stephen?” Ben calls out, standing up quickly to look around the cereal aisle, before crouching down again. “Wes, where did your brother go?”
“Daddy, get carrots,” his other son calmly requests, seemingly unconcerned about his missing sibling. Ben stands back up and starts wheeling the cart down the aisles that they’ve previously been, looking for his little lost triplet.
He couldn’t have gone that far, right?
As they pass the produce section, Wesley is now full-on yelling for carrots, so Ben grabs the closest vegetable-corn on the cob, and hands it to his son, hoping that it will appease him for just a bit while he searches for Stephen.
Next, there’s a brief stop in the deli aisle so Ben can ask an employee if he’s seen a small, three-foot tall boy in a blue and green plaid shirt.
No such luck.
“Whoa, dude,” the young staffer says, before Ben can wheel away. “Your kid just ate a big handful of blue cheese.”
“Wait, what?” Ben crouches down to look at Wesley, who is obliviously playing with his corn cob, and then back up. “No, he has some corn. What are you-”
“No, not that one. That one,” he says, pointing to Sonia.
Ben’s eyes widen as he examines his daughter. “Sonia, did you eat-”
“Cheese!” she finishes for him, and then adds “stinky,” with a bit of regret.
Before he can even start to deal with the cheese crisis (not to mention the bigger missing-son crisis), he hears his name.
“Ben? Ben Wyatt?”
He turns around and of course it’s…Shauna Malwae-Tweep, which Ben supposes is at least better than Joan Callamezzo.
Shauna’s smiling and holding a hand basket filled with a couple of bottles of wine and two steaks, which in comparison to his own cart which includes items like training pants, cereal, milk, and stuffed ostrich-approved crackers, makes Ben just a bit nostalgic. He can remember the days of buying just a few groceries for a quiet dinner in, just him and Leslie.
And for the briefest of seconds, he also lets himself recall kissing Shauna Malwae-Tweep in a parking lot, that night long ago, when the world didn’t end and later, Leslie knocking on his door impatiently and promising to not get in the way of his and Shauna’s future children.
Ben holds in a laugh at both the irony and also one of his wife’s only successful attempts at being sneaky.
“Shauna, hi. Hi there. Have you seen Stephen?”
“Is he one of your-”
“Yeah. He escaped,” Ben explains quickly, feeling a lot calmer than he actually is-quite honestly, he’s nearing panic-mode at this point. “I just…” Ben trails off and squints behind Shanuna after something catches his eye-a little flash of plaid and a small hand inside the dairy case windows.
Seriously?
“Um, hey, Shauna, could you, um, watch these two for just a second? I think I found him.”
Ben hardy waits for a response before he rushes towards the milk, easily finding a propped open door to the cooler and there Stephen is, trying to pull a gallon of 2% off the shelf and onto his head. He’s instantly filled with relief but then also panic again as Stephen manages to budge the large, heavy container just a bit.
“Stop,” he says quickly, running over to reach his son-his curious, sweets-obsessed, goofy little boy. The one that he secretly thinks takes after Leslie the most.
“Stephen, you scared me,” Ben says, picking up and holding his son tightly.
He walks back out into the main area of the store and sets Stephen down just briefly enough to take off his own jacket off and wrap it around the boy, before kneeling down and hugging him again, this time to try and warm him up.
“Cows!” Stephen shouts gleefully. “Cold cows daddy! No ice cream. I want a cookie plate, please.”
“No, honey. There are no cows at the grocery store. Just milk. And no ice cream or cookies. Hey,” Ben tugs on his sons little hands gently to get his attention, before leaning in and first kissing his forehead. “Listen. Please don’t wander off again,” he says and then notices Shauna looking over, notebook in hand. Ben sighs. “Hey, thanks for-”
“Oh, no problem. Glad he turned up so quickly.”
“Yeah. Me too,” he answers and honestly, Ben would never trade his shopping cart for one like hers even if he could. He loves his noisy, messy, completely bonkers shopping cart more than anything.
After getting Stephen back safely in the lower part of the cart, behind the fake steering wheel and right next to Wesley (and his brother’s pet corn cob that is now apparently named carrot-Bob), Ben turns his attention to his daughter and her smelly, sticky hands. Cute, adorable little hands that normally he would kiss and pretend to eat and smile at her giggles and squeals but now, hands that kind of make him want to shudder.
Why couldn’t she have eaten a bunch of cheddar samples?
“How do you feel, Sonia?” he asks softly, pushing some of her blonde hair off her face. “Is your tummy okay?”
Ben sighs in relief as she nods at him, seemingly unaffected from the god knows how many blue cheese crumbles she managed to scarf down. At least there were no tooth picks to slow her down or poke an eye out, Ben thinks gratefully.
It’s a fast trip back through the aisles, the closest route to the checkout area being aisle three, when one triplet, (he thinks it’s Wesley), starts to sing and yell out the Turtle Song.
Except, the typical driving force behind the turtle song is Leslie, usually during bath time and without her, the kids just remember the main parts-turtle jeans! poop beans! Toes! Knees! which they shout out and laugh at, all while asking him to sing along.
But mainly, and unsurprisingly he supposes, it’s the poop beans part they seem most fond of.
“Poop turtles!” Wesley adds once for good measure, and then breaks into loud laughter and squeals, before quietly saying, “uh-oh.”
They’ve started working on potty training at home, so Ben has a pretty good idea what uh-oh means. He shuts his eyes and rubs his forehead.
“Sing with us, daddy!” Sonia demands again.
“Oh, I think maybe we should wait until we get home,” he tells them, relieved that the self-checkout is empty and clear.
Minutes later, he manages to leave the store with one bag of groceries, all three kids, and maybe three-fifths of his dignity, his nerves only slightly frayed.
Once in the mini-van, Ben begins to finally relax. Everyone is safe, they have milk and things for dinner. Maybe this was okay?
He continues to assume that the drive home will be fairly uneventful, which of course, is the exact moment he hears Sonia start to cry. They’re on a quiet street just two blocks from the house, so Ben turns briefly to look and is just in time to see his adorable, little blonde daughter projectile-vomit all over the backseat.
“Daddy,” she cries out afterwards and Ben manages to pull over quickly, grab some napkins from the glove compartment, and get out of the car. When he gets the back door open, she seems to be done throwing up, but of course both her and the back seat are covered in partially digested blue cheese crumbles…and no one present was wearing a poncho.
Thankfully, both Wesley and Stephen seem too shocked to cry and moderately un-hit in terms of the mess.
“Oh, sweetie, are you okay?” It seems like a silly question, but Ben is not sure where else to start.
He gently uses the napkins to clean her off the best he can for now, and then stinky cheese smell be damned, he unbuckles her from the car seat and picks her up, hugging her tight, all while she cries and says his name.
“Shhh, you’re okay. I don’t blame you. Blue cheese is gross. You’re okay,” he repeats, already running through his head all the foods that thirty-two month olds can safely eat, relieved to remember that blue cheese is definitely on the list. “We’ll get you home and cleaned up. It’s okay. Are you okay? Does your tummy hurt now?” He’s rubbing her back while she snuggles her face against his shoulder.
“I’m okay daddy,” she answers finally, with just the barest trace of a sniffle.
Ben gets her buckled back in and is about to shut the door when Wesley holds up his hand and proudly says, “Daddy look!”
He decides to deal with the stolen candy bars tomorrow.
Once safely inside the house, it seems easier to just give all three kids a bath to make sure the cheese mishap is fully dealt with. So, everyone except him is naked and mostly clean and thankfully, the only other situation was when Wesley tried unsuccessfully to flush his socks down the toilet. But now, wet and soapy, the triplets seems almost as tired as he is.
He’s hoping that they’ll be easy to get down for an hour or two after he gets them out of the tub, so he can try to do some work. Or set fire to the mini-van, Ben hasn’t quite decided yet.
He does, however, decide to end bath time with the earlier-requested turtle song.
“Turtles wear jeans and they poop out beans, they don’t wear clothes when they wash between their…” he pauses, letting Sonia, Wesley, and Stephen do their part and respond, “toes!” as each child reaches down into the water to touch their toes.
Ben laughs and continues. “They climb up a tree, even though they don’t have…”
“Knees!”
“Okay, now let’s get everyone out of the tub and ready for nap time, okay?”
“Okay, daddy,” come the sleepy, easy responses.
When Leslie comes home and finds him on the couch a bit later, he’s exhausted for sure, but also content-especially when she tells him she’s not going back to work that afternoon.
No wait, content is not quite the right word, super-fucking-relieved is more like it.
And if Shauna does write something about the grocery store fiasco, he’s pretty sure he and Jen can probably spin this as an example of his good crisis management skills.
The whole episode actually reminds Ben that whenever he and Leslie are together and a unified team, they are just better at everything, whether it’s a city council campaign, a congressional campaign, eating a crazy amount of French macarons, or attempting a family grocery store outing.
Also…they really need to give Roz a raise.