More Why Some Days, You Just Shouldn’t Talk

So I was in the grocery store the other day with Pik, the youngest of my spawn, known collectively as “The Saffrines.” I brought her along for Sherpa duty… I mean, mother-daughter bonding time. Okay, to shut down the “there’s nothing to eat in this house” refrain.

It wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped. She’d brought her cell phone.

“Can you help me out?” I asked, trying not to sound petulant. “I don’t know what kind of cereal you want.”

“Sure, in a sec,” she said. She was ten steps behind me, texting madly, a pound of honey-coloured curls between her and reality. I rounded the corner. Any minute now, she was going to be run over, and I didn’t want to see it. Fine. She could eat toast.

In the baking aisle, she caught up with me, and I tried again. “Do you know if we’re out of baking powder?”

She lifted impossibly wide, blue eyes up at me.

“Huh?”

“Baking powder. Do you know if we’re out?”

She frowned. “What’s that?”

I frowned back. “You baked cookies yesterday. You use it all the time. Baking. Powder.”

“Mother,” she said. “I Don’t. Know What. That Is.”

I swung around to point at the shelves. “Seriously. Look at the container. You don’t recognize it at all??”

“Oh!” The light dawned over her gentle features. “Baking powder!”

“That’s what I said!!”

She laughed. “I thought you said bacon powder.”

Yep. True story.