On biting my tongue.

Over the weekend I had Violet and Jordan in the lovely store The Dollar Tree.  We were killing time before picking Shaun up for a birthday party.  I love The Dollar Tree.  I love that everything's a dollar.  How beautiful is that?  The kids love it, too, because they always get to pick out a treat.  Anything the store, because everything's a dollar! 

I have, however, noticed one flaw at The Dollar Tree.  There are never enough shopping carts.  I don't go in there very often, but the past three times they've been out of buggies and the store isn't even that crowded.  My sister brought up the possibility that maybe the carts get stolen.  I don't know.  All I know is that The Dollar Tree is a bad place for me to have to be without a device to hold my 1 year old down.  

This time, I didn't really mind because we weren't shopping for anything in particular.  I wasn't planning on spending any money aside from the kids' toys.  So I let Violet walk.  She had the best time.  She thought she was so big and she strutted and pranced around the store oohing and ahhhing over everything.  It really was adorable.  And of course, all of the customers in the store thought she was the cutest thing ever and frequently stopped to tell us so.  Except one elderly lady who let me  know that my daughter was too little to be walking around "unsupervised".  I love it when strangers feel the need to express their opinions.  It happens to me a lot… and as someone at church pointed out to me yesterday, the older a person is, the more entitled he or she feels to share an opinion.  

I just bit my tongue.  The old me would have popped off with, "Yes.  She IS really small.  She's five years old.  We just don't like to feed her that much, what with the rising cost of groceries these days."

But, I'm going to be thirty-three next month and it seems that God has finally given me the grace to watch my mouth and stop word vomit from exploding all over the place.  Sometimes.