Ever since Trudee mentioned it in the comments section, I have been listening to this song:
Odds Are, by Barenaked Ladies.
Very heartening.
One of the nice things about having a driving teenager in the house is that if I am halfway through making dinner and realize I don’t have an ingredient, I can send the teenager to the store for it. But. Last week I was planning to make chili but suddenly got in the mood to make soup instead. All I needed was the frozen vegetables, and that’s easy enough, so I sent Rob. Here is what I wrote down for him:
I explained it verbally, saying that I THOUGHT it was called “Classic” but it might be something similar, so I was writing down the exact vegetables in the blend so he’d be able to figure it out; and that I believed the bags were 16 ounces, but I needed 20 ounces so he might need to get two bags. I think that’s pretty clear. This is what I was expecting him to bring home:
But two of them, since as I remembered, the bags are 16 ounces. Here is what he instead brought home:
I mean. How did this even happen? His answers were unsatisfactory. At first he tried to defend his choice: “You said Birdseye frozen vegetables, these are Birdseye frozen vegetables!” “You said 20 ounces so I got three boxes!” “They didn’t have anything marked Classic!” It was hard to know what to say. I had him look again at what I’d written down. I reminded him of what I’d said. I didn’t want to make him feel stupid, but his wrongness was so inexplicable: microwave-ready boxes, of a specific not-at-all-what-I-said vegetable blend, that comes with a sauce. They WERE Birdseye, though! Good job, honey!
And then I still needed vegetables for the soup. I made Rob come with me to the store. He was pretty cranky about it, but I wasn’t sure how else to complete this training exercise, except to guide him to the frozen vegetable section and show him the piles of the very thing I’d asked him to buy.
My husband does similar ALL THE TIME. I’m sure Rob’s future life partner (whatever the variety) is very thankful for your lesson
Mine too. I have to show him a picture of the package beforehand.
I would think at some point in his life he would have seen the packaging at your house as you prepped dinner. So you would think he’d see the microwave ready boxes and think, hmm I’ve never seen these at our house before, this can’t be right.
Poor guy, he tried!
You wouldn’t, would you? You wouldn’t really think a teen-aged boy had ever paid enough attention to notice what a bag of frozen vegetables or literally any other dinner ingredient looks like? Unless your teen-aged boys are VERY different from mine. :)
When I send my husband out, I make him text me back pictures before he buys!
good idea!
This reminds me, in a very good way, of your post from a few years ago that discussed the fact that a helping husband is not helping if he is doing it wrong. (And that sometimes there are two ways, yours and mine, and sometimes there is right and wrong.).
Ah yes. This seems very familiar indeed. My son is only 13, but I expect many similar conversations in the future. He has a hard time even locating household items that I am pointing at while simultaneously giving verbal directions.
Yes. This.
Yes!!! My daughter is nearly 15 and can not see something directly in front of her face. Even if I tell her it is there!
I’ve had to give my son lessons on how to actively search for something, versus pacing through a room with his head wagging from side to side without actually seeing anything.
Our grocery store has an app that has photos of the products. It helps significantly. Not ALWAYS, but things have improved greatly when I make them grocery shop. And Lindsay, you can show them the package before they leave and they will STILL get it wrong. It astounds me.
Whenever I send my husband for cat food, I text him a screenshot from the Petsmart website. Much easier.
While I do have sympathy for people who aren’t visual (much harder for them to have the ‘huh, that doesn’t look like what I’ve seen in the freezer before’ moments), I completely agree with the ‘you’re coming with me’ secondary training decision. Even when people don’t mean to, they often fall into the trap of doing something wrong so that they aren’t asked to do it again in the future, and this is one of the only ways to make that choice be not fruitful.
Also, what soup were you making that uses that blend? The only one I can think of is something minestroney-ey, but since my personal soupmaking experience is mainly limited to reheating, I know that I may be missing something obvious.
It’s this recipe: soup recipe; I make it with 20 ounces of the vegetables if I don’t use the broccoli. I like to add a can of chick peas to it, too!
Made the soup this weekend, as well as Tessie’s tater tot hot dish that was referenced a few posts back. Easy, tasty, economical, and has veggies. Wonderful! Thank you for sharing. Live going into the work week with leftovers.
While I don’t cook so my issue isn’t with food but other products…contact lens solution, for example. At this point, I’ve given up. If I want to get the correct product I just go out and buy it myself.
Bare Naked Ladies = YES!
When Kevin had to shop for me, we discovered that i shop visually, meaning by color and not by actual words/brands. Not so much helpful for him.
I love that you drug him back to the store. I just picture you standing in the aisle, gesturing in a Vanna White (yet emphatic) way.
I’ve been on such a BNL jag since your post the other day. I had forgotten how much I used to like them back in the day. I concur with the photo texting- We have finally had to start doing this with my husband’s deodorant since he will tell me the name/scent and it all sounds like jibberish, and then he gets aggravated when I bring home Sport Zone This instead of Sport Fresh That. Ugh. We also do that with over the counter meds because we are old and cranky.
I am not in that phase of child training, so I will have to tuck that one in back. Right now I am fighting the “I can’t do it myself phase” even though she can clearly put on her own shoes. She has been doing it for ages now she just don’t want to be responsible for herself. However BNL have made it back into the rotation and has made me very happy.
Is this issue boy v girl? Or Gen X vs Millennial? I think when your daughter is old enough to drive, you perform a similar experiment and tell us how it turns out.
In our house, it’s definitely boy v girl. I will tell my 5 yo son to look for something himself and he’ll look for all of 2 seconds and “need” help. If I say the same to my 2.5 yo daughter, she will go away and dig and look and dig and look AND FIND IT BY HERSELF.
The number of times I think in my head, “JUST MOVE STUFF AROUND,” while helping either male in our house find something, is infinite. It’s always right there.
Yes! Move things around! The other morning my husband was looking for cream cheese in the fridge by staring into it and then declaring we didn’t have any. I told him to move things around and he acted like this was a crazy idea since the cream cheese should just be in the same spot EVERY time. Does he live in the real world with his wife and three children or in an alternate, orderly universe? I can’t even take his suggestion seriously since he’s always putting his glasses down in harms way, I move them up to a safer place and then he’s irritated that he can’t find them bunched up in an afghan with the dog sitting on them.
I should take a picture of our preferred flavor of mouthwash and my preferred brand of toothpaste, because I can NEVER remember which one. Also tuna. I can’t remember which tuna.
Ha ha, this sounds like me when I have to go to the hardware store for my husband. Now I can shop at a hardware if I need something, but when he needs something specific I ask for the empty can or tube or whatever it is. The only problem is: if they don’t have that specific item the oh my goodness I have issues. Thank goodness for cell phones (if he will answer his).
and POOF, you have taken me from “what is their PROBLEM, exactly???” To “ohhhhhhh!! wow. yeah.”
My husband rang me at work the other day to ask if we had any nail polish remover in the house (to remove the super glue he had spilt on himself, rather than for any potentially more intriguing reason). I directed him to where I thought it would be and tried to describe the bottle from memory, but, no, it wasn’t there. He texted sometime later to say that he had found it where I had said, but had overlooked it originally because it said Strengthening Nail Polish Remover, with the ‘Strengthening’ part in large bold letters and the rest in quite small letters, and he didn’t need anything strenghthened.
On the other hand he mostly does the grocery shopping, but I do it every once in a while if he’s sick, and apparently I am incapable of remembering the brand of milk that we use even though I see it in the fridge every day. I get him to write down brands etc and I phone if I’m not sure. I don’t know if that tactic works though in your scenario when someone is probably standing right in front of it saying it’s not there. Although at least then you could tell them not to bring home 3 boxes of the wrong thing.
I’m chuckling at the very male “he didn’t need anything strengthened.” Thank you for the morning humor.
My husband is fairly good, but yesterday, I sent him for a chocolate cake mix (among other things). He found everything else perfectly fine, but called me to tell me that the grocery store had NO chocolate cake mixes. 0.0 Considering this has never happened in my many, many years of grocery shopping, I had him go back and check. “There’s no chocolate cake mixes. Just this dark chocolate German one, this milk chocolate one, this chocolate fudge one… Etc”. I let him know that any of those cake mixes would work just fine. Apparently the extra words in front of chocolate confused him… Sigh.
Bahahahahahaha!!!!
This is hilarious. I can relate on so many levels (but with husband, not teenage son, same end-result though).
xox
I give my husband a written list on his phone and back it up with verbal clarification, and sometimes photographs, and still get at least four phone calls per Costco trip for him to ask for help. It’s both funny and infuriating in equal measure.
When my husband was going out I requested that he bring home either a white or yellow onion for some mac & cheese. They brought home a red onion. When I asked why red when I specifically asked for white or yellow my husband tells me, “Well, I thought it was white on the inside.” Could only have been more off if he would have brought home green onions.
My husband and children (when the kids lived at home) would often get things wrong when I asked them to do something for me. I chalked it up to the fact that, even if only subconsciously, they figured out that if they didn’t do it right, I would just do it myself next time.
I was reading over these comments, and remembered this bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YFRUSTiFUs
Relevant joke starts around 1:58 if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing.
My 15yo son is taking a cooking course this year, which has been awesome, but also revealed how very negligent I have been in educating him about ANYTHING regarding cooking. The first time we made cookies he literally could not wrap his head around the fact that we had to mix ingredients in a bowl and then put those ingredients in cookie form in the oven. But I try not to get too mad about things like the grocery store screw-up because I remember as a child being sent to the basement to look for something and I did look, hard, and move things around, and it STILL seemed like I couldn’t find it and it only appeared when my mother stomped down to look for it.