better than Legos?

We were in Home Depot (not a favorite Dennis shopping destination) when he announced the need for a potty break. I scooped him up and he asked for a piggy back ride. I suggested a piggy front ride instead, so he hung on and bounced up and down just as if he'd been on my back. Tickled, I hugged him and kissed his cheek and said "I love you, Little Bit" (referring to one of our earliest terms of endearment for him). He leaned back, smiled, hugged me and kissed me and said "I love you too, Big Bit".

Tonight he discovered the pipes that we bought today, the very ones he unloaded from the cart and put in the car all by his little helpful self, piled up in the living room awaiting their installation at our neighbor's place this week (David plumbed about 150 feet today, but that's not quite halfway). He delightedly began assembling random pipe structures, and when David tried to discourage him (fearing for the pipes), Dennis remarked "I just want to be a fixer like you, Daddy, I am trying to learn how to be just like you". Naturally, we let him pipe to his heart's content, and he made some very interesting sculptures and pipelines. It was so much fun to watch that I suddenly wanted to stock up on PVC and connectors, some for him and some for the preschool! We could certainly build some cool things with it!

I tried a wicked new bedtime strategy tonight. He started in with the usual "but I don't want to go to bed" refrain when I told him to brush his teeth, and I didn't want to spend the usual half hour arguing with him. After a bedtime story (he thought he was being all sneaky, bringing a book to the living room, asking me to read it to him), he piped up again about not wanting to sleep. I looked over at David and said "let's just let Dennis stay up and we'll go to bed". Dennis stared in amazement as we put the dog to bed and turned off all the lights. He ran to our room, but we got there first and closed him out. He stood crying in the hallway for half a minute and then ran to his room. David felt bad, so he followed and saw him in bed, turning off his lamp. So he read him a bible story and tucked him in, which probably killed my whole strategy that seemed to working so well! But Dennis went right to sleep, didn't get up even once. I'm not saying we'll regularly torture him this way, but it made for an interesting experiment in parenting. Parenting is a bit like a science lab course, now that I think about it. You try lots of different things to produce a desired result!