klepto-wet look.

I have a new thing that I do with the spud. When he's not listening to me, which is most of the time in which I am talking to him, I tell him to look at me. If he continues to ignore me, I cup his face gently in my hands and force him to look at me. If he rolls his eyes away from mine I cup my hands until he is forced to look down a little tunnel into my eyes.

You think I'm making this up, don't you?

Anyway, so, mostly this works and he pays a little bit of attention and I am, on balance, more likely to get what I want. Yesterday this meant getting him to stay close to me in the supermarket when he insisted on getting down, a process which begins with him asking nicely and swiftly escalates to him trying to climb out of a moving supermarket trolley while appalled pensioners look on.

What it didn't do however was stop him from picking up everything that caught his fancy and lobbing it into the trolley. He was seen taking back jam, pickles, a bag of pasta, some pens and balancing them precariously but reasonably accurately on their original shelves. Lastly, he chose a bottle of baby oil. By this time I was pretty much done with the idea of him roaming freely around but since he was being sweet and obediant and generally staying close I felt obligated to stick to my side of the agreement. As he walked back to the shelf to re-deposit the baby oil however, I noticed him fiddling with the lid. "Don't open that" I asked him but as most things these days are sealed with about 100 layers of plastic I figured he wouldn't be able to get into it.

Wouldn't he heck.

Just as he was reaching the shelf he popped open the lid and squeezed the bottle in one smooth motion, fountaining baby oil into his hair, his eyes, his face, mouth, hands, coat... the lot. He then deposited it back on the shelf and stood there in shock. I feel badly about the fact that it wasn't until the next day that it occurred to me that I should have purchased the bottle; at the time I was just motivated by worry and the need to stop myself from laughing as I ran over and picked him up and deposited him, unprotesting, back in the trolley. I wiped his face and asked if he was ok and, in fact, he was fine - just really, really oily; and really, really quiet. He walked around the entirety of the day sporting the 'wet look' while I spent it explaining what happened over and over again and cupping my friends' faces in my hands while they rolled their eyes.

Next time I'm shopping online.