Here is a picture from the orange home improvement store. He enjoyed riding in the storage bins.

yesterday, during a luxurious and leisurely afternoon at the mall with joey (thanks, nana), we stopped by one of my favorite stores, anthropologie. i like to go there and pretend like i live in soho and can afford the all their housewares and trinkets and clothes, and that i have a loft where everything they sell would look great. one tiny problem is, i’m not sure how their adorable aprons fit into all that…i can’t make the aprons (or baking chocolate chip cookies in them) work in my imaginary loft, but i want three anyway. yes, three aprons AND three cookies.

so we’re drooling and admiring (i say ‘we,’ joey is actually testing and assessing a magnetic kitchen timer for me, not so much drooling or admiring. it didn’t pass, by the way.), but i notice these books popping out at me, all throughout the store. maybe you know the sort of book i’m talking about, these hateful little books with titles like ’1001 places to see before you die,’ and ‘three billion books to read before you die,’ and ‘forty-leven thousand things to do with your kids before they leave the house.’ books like these. as much as i like a good list, i do not like these books.

how stressful is that, that there are whole books containing lists of things that i need to do, and on tight deadlines. and i’m gonna PAY for this? i’m supposed to pay for someone to heap their punch lists upon me? no, thank you. i think that this maybe works better in the other direction, like maybe i’ll make a list of places that i have gone, books that i have read, and things that i have done with my kid (like taken a picture of him with his pajama pants hiked up to his chin and laughed and laughed), and then maybe i’ll sell this book to THEM for 14.95. take that, THEM! HA!