Gateway

To most people, the first weekend in February is synonymous with the Super Bowl.  In our household, the weekend is shared with the an annual trip to St. Louis for the Gateway Toy Show.  Traditionally, this has been a Dad's-day-out kind of thing, but this year I decided N was finally ready to make the trip with me.  To make it more attractive to him, and break things up a bit, I combined the trip with a stop off at my brother's, and a stop at the Bigfoot shop. 

The day turned out pretty much as well as well as I could have hoped.  N was a real trooper riding in the car, and did a great job keeping himself entertained.  He played well with his cousin's, which allowed the adults to have a nice visit.  I think for him the real hit of the day was the Bigfoot shop.  He was excited to see the trucks on display outside, and inside they had some displays you could sit in. 

By the time we got to the toy show, N felt he already had enough fun for the day and was talking about going home.  Still, I managed to coax almost two hours at the toy show out of him.  Significantly less than I would have normally spent, but enough to feel like it was worth the trip.  He did better than I expected about not wanting everything he saw, but what I didn't count on was once he bought a tractor, he was ready to go play with it rather than keep looking.  He did like the displays, especially one that had several moving parts to it. 

The workshop has been reasonably quiet the past couple weeks.  As I said last time, my big project was cleaning my office and organizing my storage closet.  As a result of that, I found several toys I had bought for future projects that I now realize I will most likely never get around to.  Last week was a fairly big Ebay week getting those sold and shipped.  One truck I found in with the project candidates was one from my childhood, but it was still in remarkably good shape. I got to thinking more about the truck and realized it came from a toy show I went to with my Dad.  I don't know if it was my first toy show, but certainly the first one I can remember.  I remembered buying it because the rubber tires on it made it more detailed than any of the other trucks I had.  I also recalled leaving it in the box for a while so it would be worth more some day, and then finally giving in and getting it out to play with.  After taking that little trip down memory lane, I decided to hold on to it a little longer.

While we did miss having a Super Bowl party to go to a little bit, it was nice to just stay home and watch the game.  We got some fun snacks and ordered pizza so it felt like a little party of our own.  L and I watched the first part of the game in the garage while we worked on tractors a little bit.  I think the boys were more impressed with the commercials than the game.  Thanks to DVR we could watch their favorite commercials several times each and still catch back up to the game.  How did we ever live without DVR?