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Every weekday I pick Larkin up at Fabiola's and ask her what she wants to do for the afternoon. Go to the park? Visit my friend Dan, aka The Monkey? Head to the library and read some books?

Stroll through the center of West Hartford and check out the host of wacky, life-sized bovine sculptures known as the Cow Parade?

Or how about food shopping? "Want to go to the supermarket and have some fun?" I'll ask her.

"Please!" she says, which in her toddler-deprived lexicon comes out, appropriately enough, as "Peas!"

Food shopping is one of the stay-at-home dad tasks I consider a perk. I like being in supermarkets, and so does Larkin. How many dozens of hours have we already spent cruising the aisles in Waldbaum's and Shaw's, Stop & Shop and Whole Foods?

At 22 months she isn't as easy to manage as she was a year ago, when I'd plop her in the shopping-cart baby seat and wheel her around at my leisure while she slept. Some days she just can't stand being strapped in, and it's only 20 minutes before she loses it and melts down. But other days she can hold on longer, and we have a blast together, turning the supermarket into a colossal playground. In the wide aisles I give the cart a push and let go, calling her name out in mock-panic, then dashing after her as she cackles with delight. It's hard to say which of us loves these silly pretend dramas of emergency and rescue more.

There are the aisles and areas I have to hurry through. Like the cereal aisle, where Larkin clamors for Clifford the Big Red Dog oats, her first experience of brand fanaticism. Or the aisle where the C-O-O-K-I-E-S live. "Lahkin hungy!" she shrieks (she doesn't do R's either), grabbing whatever she can get her hands on. "Cookie now!" The dairy section is even worse. Larkin had a bad virus over Thanksgiving, with an intense fever, and mysteriously emerged from the ordeal as a raving yogurt junkie. (If anyone understands how this happens, I'd love to know.) It is a dawn-to-dusk fixation, beginning with her first plaintive, waking cry of "Yogoot!" So for now, anyway, food shopping has become yogurt shopping; and once I have the Yo Baby packages in the cart, it's a race to the cashier before she can tear one open and create havoc.

Our supermarket sprees are all about learning the names of things, connecting words to objects. In the fruit-and-produce section we tour a world of berries and apples, bananas and grapes, all Larkin's favorites, and she points excitedly and calls out their names like long lost friends. If she gets antsy, I mollify her by handing her a mango and letting her carry it around. "Appoo!" she says, the default name for whatever she isn't quite sure about. We stop to test avocados. Molly and I recently stumbled upon the happy discovery that Larkin loves guacamole -- and making it is worth it, just to hear her say the word. "What do we make with these?" I ask, holding up two avocados.

"Wackamoway!"

For me these shopping trips strike pleasing echoes of long ago. I have vivid memories of the supermarkets my mother took me to when I was small, like the A&P, where your bags got loaded into little numbered red wooden carts that trollied along the steel-wheeled conveyor belt, through an opening in the front of the store and out to your waiting car. (How 1963 is that?) I recall the oceanic vastness of supermarkets, the feeling of sailing through them like a pirate; how far overhead the lights were; the casual proximity of strangers, and the lavish, bizarre, and irrelevant products they filled their shopping carts with, suggesting a life unimaginably different from our family's.

Some of these experiences are still a ways down the road -- or aisle -- for Larkin. But I know she's already getting something out of our shopping trips. She's observing really closely; studying objects and processes. She's being exposed to other people's lives, trades and skills. And -- especially in the smaller, family-run stores we go to -- she is being woven into the community. At the meat market we use, she watches solemnly as the butcher cuts steaks from a whole sirloin. And at our corner grocery, where the dusty floorboards creak underfoot, she stands on tiptoes to reach up as Dave, the store owner and cashier, gives her a chocolate chip cookie that his mother baked that morning.

Back home, we put all the bags on the kitchen floor. Stooping, Larkin pulls out cans and packages, handing me stuff to put away. Afterwards she gathers up all the plastic shopping bags, smooshes them into a ball, and crams them into the bottom drawer. It's 4:15, and Molly will be home any minute. I want to start getting some things ready for dinner. But Larkin isn't going to make that easy. "Yogoot!" she screams -- and I begin the series of dodges and diversions aimed at curbing her mania and preventing her from turning into a living, breathing, 28-pound tublet of Yo Baby.

Or else ... I just cave in and give her some. Because lets face it, what kid ever set sail on the high seas of the supermarket and came home without demanding her share of the bounty?