Hot Wheels

My son has a love...

He loves things that go. He loves trains. He loves airplanes. But above all, he loves cars. He points out the different types of vehicles we see when we are driving around. He knows the difference between a city bus and a school bus. Police cars and fire trucks are particularly exciting. Construction vehicles make him so excited you start to worry a little that he might pee his pants.

The other day, he pointed to a car and said, "Hey dad, check out that Honda car!" Darned if it wasn't a Honda, too.

There was a day last year when I had to run an errand so I left him with his Godfather for a few hours. When I got back, he had been gifted with a bunch of old Hot Wheels that his Godfather had found in a closet. The boy was just all sorts of ecstatic. This was the beginning of a new time in his life - the time of the Hot Wheels. He has to have at least one with him where ever we go. We continually are shocked with how excited he gets if you give him a new one that is still in the package. They are the most played with out of all his toys. To say he loves them would be an understatement.

I was at my friend Suzy's house borrowing a ladder when I spied a little shelf full of teeny cubbies in her garage. She gifted it to me for the boy, because I saw only one thing when I looked at that:

Hot Wheels Storage.

The boy LOVES it. There's something gratifying about getting to see all of a collection displayed like this, even if you're only two. He's very good about putting his cars away in the little spaces. We keep some of them stashed in the closet so they can be rotated out every so often, and we left some blank spaces so that he will have a little bit of space to grow. He's going to need them!

We usually keep a few stashed in a closet as rewards or "just because" gifts. At about a buck apiece, they're pretty easy on the wallet. The supply got replenished tonight because we've resorted to using them as bribes to keep him in his own bed. We've had a really tough time getting him to want to sleep in his own bed, so now, if he stays in there at least until the sun comes up, he gets a new car. Bribery is rarely a great parenting strategy, but he went from refusing to even get near his bed at bedtime to happily climbing in and chattering about cars as he drifts off to sleep. If it costs us a few bucks in little cars over the next couple of weeks to get him to stay in there, well, we've decided that it's worth it.

Besides, it's kind of fun to go through the racks of these things at the store and pick out new ones for his collection!