(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!

An Overnight Visitor

Mr. Engineer had an impromptu playdate with SP and NT and the MOM had the bad fortune of showing up just as the "cool toys" were making an appearance. Well a melt down was in the making and then NT decided that it would be okay if the Engineer took Megatron (this mom is so uncool that I can't even remember if that was the correct name for the visiting transformer) home overnight as long as he brought him back in the morning on his way to school.

We had to take a couple of pictures of our visitor to help us remember him in all of his various forms. So here he is as a jet (?) from a couple of different angles.

We just wanted NT to know that while he was here he participated in an adventure to save the world from all of the powerful bad guys. It was so cool he had missiles that flew off of his arms and shot through the air to strike the bad guys in an AWESOME explosion. After saving the world he went to bed with Mr. Engineer and slept comfortably in a box on the train table.

In the morning he supervised the recharging of the troops by keeping careful watch from the counter as cereal was consumed topped with colored marshmellows. When it was time to go out the door Megatron was the first one in the car and he reminded the Engineer of his forgotten backpack as we were pulling out of the driveway.




And one final picture in his robot from just outside NT's house early in the morning before going back home.

Thanks SP and NT for letting Megatron come and spend the night with us.

You truly saved the day!