Ella will sit in the shopping cart seat if I put down a warm blanket first. So I used one of those brown ones that we have so many of and placed her in the seat. As we went through the store, she was attracted to a few items that I picked up: small orange juices for Kenny, coffee for Jeff, a jar of peanut butter - so attracted that she had to have them next to her in the seat.

At the checkout, she moved the items from her seat to the belt and I took care of the items in the basket. She swiped my credit card and would have entered most of our phone number if the checker hadn't reached over and put in some other code. Ella selected "Credit" and we checked out rather quickly because we didn't have many things.

Unloading the items into the car, I noticed that the coffee was not in a grocery bag but was loose in the brown blanket in the seat. I talked with Ella about it, asking her whether she'd put the coffee on the belt. I was pretty sure of the answer already. She apologized about it, but she's very quick to apologize even if she isn't guilty. So I looked over my short receipt just to make sure and didn't see coffee listed.

In my younger days, I would have been quite proud to march back into the store and happily announce that I was paying for something that got overlooked. Now, with the cold and other pending things on my "to-do" list, my response to my conscience was more like, "Do I have to?" I even thought about just leaving the coffee in the shopping cart. "Is it stealing if I abandon it?" I don't drink coffee anyway!

But, alright, I took Ella and the item back into the store. She was still eating the bagel that we had bought on our first trip. I muttered, "Oh, they'll think we need to pay for the bagel too, huh?" I went to the seven items and less lane, put the coffee on the belt and didn't say anything about the bagel. The checker asked, "And the bagel too?" and I said it was our second time through, so no, thank you. I didn't really care, actually. A bagel doesn't cost much so if she chose not to believe me, no biggie, I'd pay again.

So it was all kinda painless and, frankly, by the time I'd gotten over to school to pick up the boys, I'd forgotten all about it. But I kept the coffee receipt on my front seat as a reminder. And now that I think about it, I left the jar in the car!

Does coffee freeze?¹

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¹ I told Jeff the story and after he called me nuts for going back into the store, he quipped that coffee is already "freeze-dried!"

This is all because I bought decaf by mistake on Sunday!