doing his own shopping

A belated birthday card for Dennis came in the mail today, and when I got back in the car from checking the mail, he said "does that say 'Dennis Mitchell' on it?" and I was happy to tell him that it did! He opened it to find a fire truck card that he loved, and a twenty inside that made him yell "I got money!". Since we had confiscated the rest of his birthday money and applied it to swim lessons, I decided to let him spend this how he pleased. He chose two trucks at Wal-Mart, a police truck and a garbage truck, and also picked out his first watch, a Spiderman timepiece that he's especially thrilled to have. I let him put the money in the self checkout and bag his own toys. I can't tell you how much time he spent trying to decide what to get--he deliberated for a very long time! He showed his new purchases to Uncle Denny when we delivered the groceries, and he took his new garbage truck to church with us when we went to have our picture made this afternoon for the new church directory. When we left the house, the garbage truck was picking up our garbage, and we had to stop and wait for them to get out of our driveway. Dennis held up his new toy garbage truck and compared it to the real garbage truck. He was very excited. He wanted to show the garbage men his truck. Instead, he showed it to everyone we passed at church!

I had hoped he'd nap before our picture session, and he did fall asleep in the car on the way home from the lake, but he cried pitifully when I tried to put him in his bed after we got home. His nose was running and he was so sad and upset and insisted he didn't need a nap. I left him in the bed and took a shower, and when I got up, I found him happily watching Bee Movie while lying in his bed. He knows how to turn on the TV and DVD player, and he knows how to wait through the previews and how to press the play button when the menu screen appears. Pretty impressive. David says he conked out hard after the picture session, so he's getting his nap in now--I'm spending the afternoon at Curves, working out and working!

It was extremely difficult to get my child to smile at the portrait session today. The photographer was all but standing on her head and so was her assistant, trying to get the elusive Dennis grin. About halfway through the session, I revealed the magic word: boogers. So we spent the next half of the session discussing boogers with Dennis breaking out into big giggles. It didn't even shock the photography people, thank goodness, and I'm very glad the older church members weren't standing around in the hallway today!