Mom Shares Hilarious Story of Her 3-Year-Old 'Traumatizing' a Stranger at the Grocery Store

Every parent knows that taking little ones to the grocery store can be a massive, multitasking-packed undertaking. Sometimes, they're on their best behavior. Other times, well, they're—as one mom on the Parenting subreddit put it in a hilarious viral post—"feral." Writing under the handle u/buckshill08, the mom of three explained that she thinks she may have "traumatized a stranger with her feral 3-year-old."

"I might be dead inside now? Or would be if they weren't so damn cute," the original poster (OP) shared. She offered background that she has a 2-year-old boy, a 3-year-old "wild child" (who is also her only girl), and a "super-helper" 8-year-old. When she goes grocery shopping, her eldest usually helps keep the little ones in check: "His eagle eyes will catch one starting to strip while I am wrangling shelf snatched M&Ms from the other. I wish this wasn't an actual example!"

But on this given day, the OP only had her two smaller ones with her, as her oldest had strep. She put her 2-year-old in the front seat and the 3-year-old in the actual cart. "This very sweet, soft spoken, elderly woman stops me to tell me my kids are cute," u/buckshill08 wrote. "They were not at that moment flinging feces, so yeah... super charmers my guys are. She tells me she's just been blessed with her second great granddaughter...goes on to say how the new baby and her sister are barely 2 years apart."

The OP made a comment about how the woman's great-granddaughters will be the "best of friends and how the mom will adapt to juggle them both... It's not so hard!" At that moment, she was simultaneously trying to stop her youngest from"whipping a tampon out of the purse he has just figured out how to unzip." She explained that he was also "slightly obscuring my view of my 3-year-old in the main cart... who is being quiet.... TOO QUIET."

That's when she heard the "sweetest little 'mmm yummy,'" and the stranger cut off her reply and her face shifted to "horror."

OP explained, "My daughter. In the span of less than a minute...has taken the pound of butter—the only item I deemed safe enough to place in the actual cart with her, the rest was underneath. She's torn into it like a velociraptor with a My Little Pony fetish. She's inhaling the butter with one hand and using the other to smear it into her hair."

The great-grandmother was left "stuttering," after the Redditor said "something along the lines of 'yeah... and sometimes it looks like this.'"

Her conclusion: "I think my explanation to the teenage cashier may have encouraged in him a renewed appreciation of birth control... or hopefully respect for his own mother."

The thread quickly racked up many comments from Redditors laughing with the mom and sharing their own similar, cringe-worthy experiences. Poster u/FormerWindow shared, "I got a little too close to a shelf once and within a second, mine had grabbed a pack of hot dogs and bit into it. Apparently, we were buying hot dogs that trip. We also only shopped after mealtime until she grew out of that."

Poster u/Mannings4head chimed in, "At least it was food. When my daughter was 3 and my son was 2 (18 months apart so solidarity) I took them into the bathroom stall, so my daughter could pee. We were cramped in the small stall, and my daughter was complaining about having to use the gross potty in the smelly men's room. I was trying to hold her above the toilet to pee, and while she was holding her nose she let out a scream. I looked over to see what she was yelling about, and my son was licking the door. The stall door. Of a public restroom."

Poster u/CakeNinja85 shared, "My 11-month-old was also being very quiet on a recent trip to the grocery store. I look down to find her gnawing her way through a block of feta cheese. She screamed the place down when I took it off her, so I opened a baby snack bar and swapped it with that. I found it funny!"

That attitude is probably the best any parent can have. When it comes to overly curious, hungry kiddos, what are you going to do? After all, sometimes, parenting does look "like this"—for butter or worse, right?