Thanks, but no...

I was in Brueggers the other day getting my normal sausage, egg & cheese bagel and large iced tea with my youngest. I used to get him a chocolate milk and we would sit together and eat and talk before school. But it wasn't long before I realized that drinking chocolate milk that early in the morning makes him mean. Really mean. So I stopped getting it and we do 1/2 apple juice, 1/2 water now. Well yesterday he must have remembered "hey, this is where I used to get chocolate milk" and started crying for it. He cried all through the line and checkout "Mommy, pwease, I want my chocate mulk...!" The two ladies in front of me kept looking at him and laughing and saying "oh, how sweet..." and "he's so cute". Well by the time we were leaving, the one lady turned to me and said "can I please buy him some chocolate milk? He is breaking my heart." I laughed at her and said "only if you want to deal with him in 45 minutes when the sugar kicks in." She laughed understandably and went back to her friend. After I left the store, I wondered what she possibly thought of me as a mother to have offered such a thing. I mean, here I am with bagel and a huge iced tea when my child is crying for something I won't give him. Did she think I was just a horrible mother? Maybe the thought didn't cross her mind at all. I vowed to myself never to judge another mother in the way she handles her children. You don't know what they are like, what they have been like that day or what works on them and what doesn't. Only a mother knows. And unless a family looks hungry, I vow never to offer to buy a 3 year old chocolate milk.