Thankful Thursday - 10.11.12

Ten Eleven Twelve... how cool is that?

This week, my thankfulness kind of has a theme.

Bubba likes to watch YouTube videos.  As anyone who has spent time on that site knows, every video has related videos in a sidebar.  Once you start clicking on those, it's easy to fall down the YouTube Rabbit Hole, so to speak.  You never know where you're going to end up!

Well, the weekend before last Bubba ended up in The Littlest Pet Shop, and he fell in love.  It really doesn't surprise me at all because this kid has always had a soft spot for the kitty cats and let's face it - most of those "pets" look like kitty cats anyway, right? My boy was hooked.

It had to have been about a year ago that we got this Littlest Pet Shop toy by accident in a Happy Meal.  It's been floating around in the bins of random toys around here, but he never really paid much attention to it.  I actually had meant to go through the toys and send a bunch of them to the Goodwill, but due to my slacker-iness in pregnancy I never got around to it.

I'm thankful that I didn't, because if I had, this for sure would have been gone.

As it was, he remembered that he had it (the stuff a three year old's mind can recall is amazing) and dug around until he found it.  It replaced a car as his constant companion for several days in a row.  One day I noticed him playing with the little dog, acting out a little scene from one of his videos.  In the role of the second pet?

A piece of orange plastic.  I felt equal parts proud of his imaginative play and sorry for him to have to use a piece of plastic cut from a tiny traffic cone (I made it into the Cozy Cone Hotel for Lightning McQueen) as a second toy.  Soooo...

On my next trip to the Walmarts I checked out their whopping selection of FIVE pets and selected a kitty cat to keep his Happy Meal dog company.  His mom's a sucker!  He named them Rose (the cat) and Alicia (the dog) and they watched many videos and went on many adventures together in a die cast Shelby Cobra, Thelma and Louise style.  Okay, minus the cliff at the end, but you know what I mean.

I'm thankful that my husband isn't one of those guys who will freak out because I'm buying our son "girl" toys.

Then, last weekend when Aunt April was here, he needed to show her the other pets on a trip to Target.  One mama's soft spot later, and a two pack with a Lion and a Bunny was on the way home with us.

SUCKER.

I'm thankful that my husband's relatives don't judge me for buying my son "girl" toys either.  :)

He likes to show his new toys to his sister and encourages her to share them.  I think it's pretty easy for him at this point because she hasn't really mastered grabbing stuff yet and if he gets tired of her paying attention to his toys it's easy to just grab them all and go into the other room.

I'm thankful that he loves his little sister, and loves to share with her and to make her laugh.

So today my husband was telecommuting so I took Bubba with me to go on a donut run... yeah.  A donut run that turned into an almost three hour trip!  HA!

I'm thankful that my husband can telecommute two days a week, which means he is home with us more days than not.

I'm thankful that when he is telecommuting he is okay with me occasionally leaving a child with him so I can go out and run errands with only one little person in tow.

I'm thankful that he doesn't flip out when I say I'm going to get donuts, then decide on a whim to pop into the Dollar General because I heard they had Littlest Pet Shop toys there pretty cheap, and then decide to hit a couple of Goodwill's too.  I figured that since I had planned on sending Bubba's old Happy Meal toys there, maybe some other people had too.

I'm thankful for the Goodwill, and people who donate to the Goodwill, because now Bubba's menagerie has almost doubled and I've been entertained all night by him playing with his pets.  He comes up with some pretty funny story lines!  Talk about a dollar well spent.

The way I see it, they're great for imaginative play, they're a nice break from the Hot Wheels that have dominated his play for the past two years, and when he gets tired of them, odds are good his sister will gain interest in them.

Oh, and I'm thankful for Dunkin' Donuts.  YUM.