Disclaimer: After reading this post, you may have negative feelings about my son and my parenting ability...but I am sharing it anyway!
With the all consuming house stuff, I decided to take Wyatt out for a day of fun. He has been dragged to every home improvement store you could imagine - plumbing, lighting, brick, cabinets - you name it, he has been subjected to it. I called my mom and asked her to come along to Build-A-Bear. I have never taken Wyatt there as I was a bit skeptical. But I thought he would really get into the whole "do it yourself" part.
We get to the mall and I walk him towards the Build-A-Bear store - the one I have always done my best to rush him by in the past for fear that he would see it and want to go in. I am just so proud of myself for thinking up this fun day. I don't know what I was expecting - maybe a smile, maybe a rush towards the bin of lifeless animal bodies, a screech of joy - you know, something to communicate that he sure was glad it wasn't another home improvement store. So I did the whole "look, you can pick out an animal and then we can fill it up, and blah, blah, blah."
He looked at me and said "I want to ride the escawator."
Nice - he had zero interest in the whole shebang.
But I pressed on. I showed him the machine that has all the various sounds you can choose to add to your animal.

That got him to momentarily forget about the "escawator". He was perfectly content to stand there and press all the buttons. Didi and I saw that he wasn't really going to run with this so we "helped him" with his decisions which in reality was "Just grab the freaking monkey and the monkey sound piece."
Then the SUPER sweet girl who worked there went through her spiel about the tracking ID and tried every trick in the book to get some excitement out of the Prince. He didn't want to rub the heart to get it warm and he didn't want to jump up and down to get it started.
But he did press the foot pedal to get the stuffing into the monkey.

In a last ditch effort, I tried to get him to pick out an outfit for the monkey. Hello? Why was I so determined to waste more money? But he didn't care about outfits or any of the hundreds of accessories either. He was now back to wanting to ride the "escawator" so he got a naked monkey and that is it.
Both of us were glad to be done!

So we rode the escalator down to the bookstore where we had some more tense moments with him as he was being impatient while we were looking at books for him. He wanted to ride the blasted cement truck toy thing that they put out to make parents' trips to the mall more difficult. Seriously, I never see kids on them. I see parents dragging their kids past them and saying "not now, we don't have time or I don't have any money" which is the line I use.
But his sweet Didi gave him 75 cents and in his
one redeeming moment of the day, he went up to Didi and told her thank you without being prompted by me. So he rides the truck and we leave the mall and go to meet my dad for lunch. I won't bore you with the details of that but I ended up with Wyatt in the bathroom threatening him to straighten up or ELSE!
Then we took him to Across the Pond which is an awesome gardening, patio, landscaping, cool house items kind of place that also has a building with huge fish you can feed. Finally, something he enjoyed and he was semi-well-behaved.

I know this is a long post but I have one more story to share. My parents wanted to come up to the land and see the house since they had almost finished with the brick. Wyatt wanted to ride with them. His big thing right now is "beating you or racing you." So I wasn't surprised when my mom passed me and I saw his little smiling face pop up in her back window. He was thrilled that they were winning.
So we get to the land and my mom has a story to share. Each time Wy would lean up and over to look out the back window, his Didi would have to remind him to sit down on his bottom. (He rides in a booster using the lap & shoulder belt) At one point he tried to take a leg out from the seat belt part. Didi sternly told him to sit down and put both legs under the seat belt. He was not complying in a timely fashion. So my mom says:
"Wyatt, do I need to pull over and have a talk with your Mama?"
And he says:
"Well...
...you can talk to Jesus."
WHAT IN THE WORLD? I do not know where he comes up with this stuff.
I am hoping that it is because he understands that you can indeed talk to Jesus.
But I have a sneaking suspicion it may have something to do with me telling him on several occasions over the course of his little life that we were about to have a "come to Jesus meeting."
Time for Mama to pick a new phrase. At least my parents thought it was humorous and not blasphemous! That is always a plus!