Playing Mommy

My Baby Girl loves to model what I do.

 Just this last month she has really gotten into buying groceries like Mommy.  She loves to go to the grocery store with me.  Of course at Hy-Vee she gets to push her own cart and at Fareway she gets to drive in one, so that just makes it even better, but she loves to help me shop.  Recently, she wanted to do grocery shopping at home.  She was so cute, and I'm sure I'm biased, but she said "Mommy, go shopping?"  And I of course said "well we don't need to right now, but we can this weekend."  She grabbed her cart and said "No, Mommy go shopping, at home" with a little smile.  Then I realized she wanted to play shop.  So I said, "Ok let's go".  Now here comes my favorite part "Mommy where is the grocery store?"  It was so cute!  She wanted to play shop, but we haven't done that yet and so we haven't created a play store in our house, she didn't know where to do her play shopping.

So we got right to it.  Now we don't have a lot of play food, and when I started to make a play grocery store, I realized how little we have for play food and play food containers.  But, then I thought, I'm sure I could make something.  Here are some of the things we used:

Crocthed fruit (my sister makes these check her out here)

An empty graham cracker box
An empty Triscit cracker box
An empty cereal box
(All of these were added as we used them)
Her container of maccaroni noodles

We just used some empty baskets that I had around the house as produce and dessert holders.

Really we just used what we had on hand.  There was no money spent.  This entertained her for at least 30min, and if you have a toddler you know that's a long time for them.

We set up her grocery store on some shelves in our dining room.  She used a little felt bag that she could walk by and collect her grocery items in. (Another way of modeling me as I try to use reuseable bags whenever I can).  For the bigger items she would use her grocery cart too.  Can't say thanks enough for this item from her aunt and uncle, we've had it for 2 years and she still loves it!

Some other things to add: 

Old gift cards to pretend pay.
Paper money to practice adding or the act of purchasing.  You can check out my how to on making your own paper money here. 
Real food like fruits that they can then eat as a snack.