spoken for

Elijah pretty much made out like a bandit this birthday. He ended up with a rather good-sized John Deere tractor, a Mack & Lightning McQueen Lego set, some small hotwheels, several new outfits, army men, a toy long barrel Kentucky rifle, a bubble blowers set, a dry-erase writing thing, $30 worth in a giftcard and cash, not to mention the tractor that came off of the cake. Who knows if I even missed anything, the day was quite a whirlwind, especially when it came to presents.

Tonight, though, we all went out for a sit-down dinner and then we drove around a bit looking for nature (and did find 5 deer), then to the store for Elijah to spend his $30. He has more money than that but the rest is in coins so we left it for another day. He’s been filling this can in the hopes of going on a shopping spree.

So he chose this motorized backhoe thing and a Mater Lego set.

Which brings me to my next point.

I. Hate. How. They. Package. Toys.

Can’t they just put stuff in a box anymore? I’ll even deal with Styrofoam if I have to. Best, yet, for something like this, though, would be the thing unboxed, unpackaged with a price tag attached!

I mean, first I had to rip open the box — that took a good amount of time right there. Then I had to wrangle the toy out of the box where it was still attached to cardboard. I then had to remove two heavy duty twisty tie things, a zip tie, and actually remove twelve — TWELVE! — screws from six — SIX! — extra plastic pieces to get the stupid thing off of that cardboard and get it to operational status! Then there was the cardboard guy who was sitting inside the cab with a piece hanging out stating that most figures of such and such size could sit in there. Even that was a pain to get out.

Through it all, however, and oh, very surprisingly, Elijah stood there patiently, looking all melt your heart cute.

The Legos though? He opened that box, Steve helped him with the plastic bags, then Elijah had it all put together by looking at the picture of the box, all before I had a chance to even enter the room.

Well it could have been worse, I guess. Elijah could have been two years old again, screaming the whole time that he wanted the toy that was taking Mommy 30 minutes to remove from the packaging…

And now, for random purposes none other than the fact that I adore the frogs, here are some scrapbooking pages I did yesterday:

The end!