thinning the herd

The church nursery is in need of toddler toys, and boy do we have those to spare! I spent the morning culling the things he doesn't play with any more, things that are really baby toys, and I have some boxes full to donate. Dennis didn't seem to upset by it, though he did grab a few things and take them back to his room. He has more than enough. And I left all his Fisher Price Little People stuff in his room. Though he is getting a little big for it, he still LOVES the stuff and we have a fortune's worth of it. His Uncle Michael and I played with our little people for YEARS. I figure in 5 years when he stops playing with it, I'll pack it up and save it just so that he'll have the delight of watching his kids play with it years down the road (much as I was thrilled to unpack our old stuff at Granny's and watch Dennis play with it). His room doesn't look much better, I'm sorry to say, but there are more places to store what he does use every day. And we culled out a giant box of Happy Meal toys. We will use these for future geocaching excursions, trading a crappy toy for whatever crappy toy Dennis chooses from the 'treasure boxes' we find. I hope to do more geocaching this spring and summer--David loves it and Dennis likes finding treasure, too, though he doesn't know how to work the GPS as of yet (I barely know how myself). If you've never heard of the sport, visit geocaching.com and read up, and imagine us tromping through woods, often off-trail, looking for tupperware and ammo boxes hidden in fallen trees and the like.

Dennis was so cute playing in his clean room with his Daddy tonight. He's been playing car race lately. He found a toy trophy, Little People sized, that came with a horse farm playset, and he staged the Wood Valley 500 on the rug. He got the name of the race from the Handy Manny special that we watched on movie night last week. After he raced the winning car across the finish line, Dennis presented the driver with the trophy. I didn't see any of this, as it happened when he was playing with his Daddy, so when he asked me today if we could play car race, I wanted to just so I could see his imagination in action. He asked me just as I was readying him for his nap, so I told him I had to clean up the raceway so we could race after his nap. He went right to sleep, miserable as he is with spring allergies (today we watched clouds of pollen blowing around outside--we are all sniffly and sore-throated), and when he woke up a couple hours later, the first thing he said as he was opening his eyes was "did you clean our raceway, Mommy, so we can have our race?". I had been doing laundry and forgot all about it, but I said yes. Somehow the race with me never happened because he discovered that his Daddy had gotten home from work while he was sleeping, and we all cleaned and played trains, and tonight David built a big and extravagant race oval outline out of the multi-colored and multi-shaped foam blocks (and Dennis helped), and they had races in there while I was cleaning other places. We just enjoyed being home together tonight, and I know these are the times I will remember fondly in future years, how we all love being together. He gave us lots of hugs and kisses and "I wuv you"s, too, and he was just so darned sweet today. I hate that he doesn't feel well. He asked for medicine a dozen times and even learned how to use the bulb syringe on himself, sticking it up his nose and suctioning it out. Each time he pulled it out, he looked at it carefully and yelled "Ewwwww--I got more boogers out!".