Parenting in Sussex: Why you should never take kids to the supermarket

All I wanted was a lemon. I’d forgotten to ask Mr Tesco to deliver it with my weekly groceries, and I needed it for the pancakes I was making to celebrate my daughter’s birthday weekend (we do it every year!).

I only brought the kids with me as it was raining and it seemed like a good idea to get them out of the house. The plan was to grab said fruit and leave.

Of course, that’s not at all how it went. We’d had candy floss grapes added to the trolley (the trolley we didn’t need but had been procured so they could take turns pushing it around the store) before we’d even been there for two minutes.

And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the juice aisle and I was agreeing to buy smoothies and a jumbo bottle of some kind of mango and passionfruit juice concoction. Soft touch? Me?!

We had a look at the hair care aisle – because, why not?! – and, because I love a bargain, the yellow sticker section. Another mistake, as the first thing my daughter saw was a reduced pack of sushi which she simply ‘had to have’.

Conflicted, because I didn’t really want to spend £4.55 on it (‘but it’s a good price, because it was £7 before’, chirped up my daughter), but also conscious that I like it when my children eat food that isn’t traditionally kid fodder, it obviously ended up in the trolley.

We should have just gone straight to the checkout now, but then I thought that maybe I should buy another bag of plain flour, just to be on the safe side. This was fatal.

We passed sweets, chocolates, snacks… More items crept into the now-quite-full trolley. And before I knew it, I was checking out and spending £24. On a shop that should have cost 35p.

It sure was an expensive mistake and a lesson learned – to not forget things on my weekly shop in the first place!