Boy helping with shopping

We have two supermarkets in our home town - a "budget" one and a "high end" one. When grocery shopping I typically visit both - I buy as much as possible in the "budget" store, but there are some items which it either doesn't stock or I want a particular brand, so I have to grab those from the other store.

Now the kids don't like being dragged around the supermarket at the best of times, but being dragged around TWO is the worst thing ever (apparently!). This afternoon I took my son shopping, and he was fine in the first supermarket, but really didn't want to go to the second.

"We won't be long" I promised him "I've only got 7 things left on my shopping list".

Our high end supermarket allows you to scan your shopping yourself, so to keep my son happy I let him have the "zapper" and be in charge of scanning. As we wandered around picking up the odd thing here and there I thought I could hear him muttering something each time he scanned, but couldn't quite make out what he was saying. Finally, in the milk aisle, he scanned one item

"That's 7 Mummy".

Unfortunately I'd picked up two of that particular item, so I presented him with the second which he scanned, then said "that's EIGHT!" and finally burst into tears.

Which was when I realised - he'd been counting each item as he had scanned them for me, and when he reached seven he thought we were all finished. So I had to explain to him that whilst I had said we only needed seven things, in some cases we needed more than one of each thing, and so the total number would be more than seven.

He took a little convincing, but as you can see in the photo he was quite cheery at the end.