Misguided Advice

I blame the chlorine for my lack of memory.  How I could forget what happened at Walmart on Sunday is beyond me.

I left my debit card at home Sunday after church, so I had to run the husband and the boy home so 2.0 could take a nap.  That meant I went back to Walmart to buy my groceries alone, a rare treat.  It's so much easier to buy bananas when the little one isn't trying to grab them out of the cart and eat them with the skin on before I can pay for them.

As I'm at the check out, the cashier weighs my bunches of bananas (I had two) and says that I must be happy that they are still $.50 a pound.  I reply that I am happy about that because my little boy loves bananas and eats them all the time.  Now this cashier was an older woman, older than my mom, and I've never seen her before.  I'm fairly certain she doesn't know how old my son is as she's probably never seen him before.

Her retort to my comment was this: "He's not supposed to have more than half a banana a day.  If you keep giving him that many bananas, he'll get fat from the sugar."  My reply was "well, he loves them and I'm not going to take them away."  The cashier then proceeded to process the rest of my groceries without another word and didn't even say 'have a nice day' to me as she handed me the receipt.

I love when people who don't know my child and don't know me that well decide that they know exactly how my child should be raised.  I think that bananas are better than potato chips and chocolate and that not wearing socks isn't that big of a deal.  But don't tell the well meaning crazy women at Aldis that.  A barefoot child is horrible to some of them.

No matter who you are, if you take your child out in public, someone is going to have a comment about how you raise him.  I think that there's something in the female psyche that creates this compulsion to do so.  I try to keep my comments about a parent's style to myself unless asked, but I'm still young.  If I think a child is over- or underdressed for the weather, I keep that comment to myself.  How do I know that the child didn't remove an article of clothing in the car?  My own child is a professional at it.  There are probably tons of lost socks in my van because 2.0 hates socks.

Even in the groups I'm part of on facebook, there are things said that I don't agree with.  I personally wish someone had told me to buy some newborn diapers so I wouldn't have had to go out and buy them four days after my son was born.  When I typed that in the group, I was not only shot down, but ridiculed for it.  But that's information I think a new mom should have and if she asks for it (which she did in this case) that's what I would advise.

I guess the most important thing about misguided advice is that more often than not, the person giving it means well.  I wonder about the motivation of the cashier at Walmart (you don't tell a mom that her child is fat unless the child is REALLY fat), but for the most part it's meant in good faith.  Sometimes you just have to let things go into one ear and out the other.