(Day 12) Thankful for. . .

I'm thankful for toy catalogs and childhood memories!

This afternoon my boys were perusing and dreaming about what amazing things they too could purchase from the Lego catalog and from the other room I hear the Engineer say, "Wow! Look what we can have for FREE! " I knew what they were talking about because I had looked through the catalog earlier and saw the little postcard that in the fine print said if you buy this really great Lego ship for $60 $59.99 then you can also have this smaller Lego ship FREE! Of course FREE was the largest word on the page next only to the magnified picture of the small ship. I went in to help them understand what the small print was saying and crush their poor little dreams (which they actually took quite well). My Comedian wanted to know if they were trying to "play a joke on us" and then they were back to dreaming and scheming.

The experience really took me back to a time when my younger brother and I were perusing the JCPenney's catalog (we must have been around the same ages; old enough to have some concept of money and yet too young to understand the fine print) and we found several pictures of these AMAZING cars that were just our size (HA! HA!) and they only cost $200 or well probably $199.99 because that is so much more affordable. We dreamed and schemed and planned for days over those cars. I remember it was in the fall so both of us had upcoming birthdays and Christmas where we could get some of the money needed. I even remember collecting pennies, nickles and dimes that I came upon around the house (sorry Mom), in the road and parking lots. Over time he compromised and decided that the motorcycle wasn't practical because we both couldn't ride at the same time. I eventually (and reluctantly) decided that since he was a boy the Barbie land rover was probably too pink for him to be seen in. Finally we settled on some sort of green jeep looking thing because we could both drive and green could be a girl color too. I planned on how we would drive to my grandmothers (an hour away) whenever we wanted to. He wanted to go driving in the mountains and down to the "farm" (where our great grandmother, great uncle and some cousins lived--almost 2 hours away) and how we could just pack up and go camping. Oh we had amazing plans!


Based on my memory the photo in the catalog looked something like this. Except of course it was green. Now my boys own a little battery operated car. We call it the "pink jeep" because the red plastic has faded and can sadly now be called nothing other than pink. When my boys were 3 or so they would drive it all over the yard and have a blast. By the time they were 5 or so they could still drive it but their knees were all the way up to their elbows and it was much more difficult to maneuver. There is no way that either my brother or I could have even fit in one of these little darlings that seemed so big to us. At the time we were certain that the girl and boy shown must be our size. I don't remember how we got distracted from our big dream or what replaced it. I do however remember the first time (many years later) that I realized exactly how big tiny our big dream car was!