If there was a national alert warning for today's errand it would have been rated bright fucking red. Today was a high-alert day. As in, my kid better chill the fuck out or someone is going to report me to child protective services for abandoning her along with the grocery cart at Walmart.

The errand started out on a high note; she was in a good mood snacking on Elmo-shaped crackers and sipping water from her sippy cup while singing to herself in her car seat. Bliss, right? She giggled at me as I sang along to "Dude looks like a lady" by Aerosmith and I made faces in the rear view mirror to keep the giggles going.

Then we got to Walmart (this could have been ANY grocery store; it wasn't so...Walmarty today. The hillbilly count was low) and as soon as I put her in the cart she flipped out and started sobbing and hollering like I was abducting her. Luckily we didn't draw attention to ourselves and I held her with one arm and pushed the cart with the other. At this point I'm slightly annoyed but whatever.

We headed to their seasonal section to look for lights to put on the Christmas tree and for the front yard. She actually let me put her in the seat as long as she could play with a box of lights. Fine. As long as she doesn't start chewing on the cords she can keep herself occupied.

Oh wait! Silly me! Of course the lights only entertained her for thirty seconds. Her attempts to get out of the cart began again so I picked her up but she didn't want to be held.

"PUT ME DOWN!" she yelled at me. Great. I swear I'm not kidnapping her in the holiday aisle at Walmart.

She wanted to push the cart. Awesome. What-the-fuck-ever, Avery. I let her push the cart and I pushed it too so that we would actually go in the direction I needed to go. We were there to obtain food and various household items and even though I didn't have a list I was sure that I'd be able to remember everything.

And then she started crawling UNDER the cart where the bottom rack was missing. Great. My kid was now pushing the cart from underneath it, crawling on the floor. I felt like a winner. Truly my parenting skills are second to none and I was waiting for frazzled mothers to come up to me and ask me "how DO you do it?" while I smile and shrug humbly. Skillz, I haz them.

At this point I'm mortified at her behavior and my inability to wrangle her. She refused to sit in the cart and she would only let me hold her part of the time. When she wanted to walk I had to keep telling her to quit fucking up shit on the shelves.

And yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I said to her.

By the time we left we had spent $200 and I had totally forgotten to get some of the items we needed. It was such an aimless trip and since I spent the majority of the time keeping her from knocking stuff over or running away from me I was too exhausted to go back for the rest of the stuff. It took us two hours to get through the grocery store.

On the ride home she dumped out her bag of Elmo-shaped crackers leaving the back seat of my car littered with little Muppet crumbs. I wanted to throw Avery at her dad when we got home but he was working so I had to unload the car and keep her from having a temper tantrum just long enough for me to put the cold stuff into the fridge.

She drove me to the brink today. If this was a test? I totally fucking passed.