The Store

Lots of birthday and Christmas presents around this time of year always means it's time to do some early "Spring cleaning" and make room for the new things.  We haven't gotten around to it, so Alex's birthday presents were sitting around in a pile downstairs.  At first he built a castle wall in front of the kitchen table with them, but when I told them they couldn't stay in the kitchen, he carried them all upstairs, one by one, and barricaded himself into the guest bathroom.  I thought he was just building another wall out of them, but soon he started beckoning me over, waving and yelling "Ma'am, Ma'am, come over here.  No wait, you can't park there.  Park over here."

And that was the beginning of "The Store".  Turns out he didn't want to open his birthday presents as much as he wanted to arrange, and re-arrange, and re-arrange the various packages.  Soon, he decided he was going to name it "The Best Store" and it needed a sign.  And not long after they started selling toys, they also started selling smoothies, modeled after the cafe in their favorite store (sorry to say, Uncle Scott, that it's Fry's, of course!).  He recruited Josh to work there, although it took a little while for them to figure out the whole concept.  They started with "How much money do you want us to give you?" and "Here, take these two items and a Smoothie for free because you purchased a puzzle for $1".  Didn't take long though. Now I more commonly hear, when asking how much something costs, "Well, how much money you got??" and "If you don't have any money, you had better drive over to the bank first."

I took some pictures of The Store, but somehow deleted them off my camera.  In the meantime, The Store had to relocate.  After a month, we really kind of needed the guest bathroom back.  So The Store moved to the playroom fort, and has expanded with parking signs, no parking signs, a clock to indicate when the store is open, a cash drawer, a cafe that takes up the entire "upstairs" and a bank across the street.  One by one, the birthday presents are getting opened and played with, but the boxes are returned to the store so they can be repackaged and resold (hey, just like the real Fry's!).  It's really quite amazing of them, and they have no idea that I'm sneaking in some lessons on counting, addition, subtraction and telling time.  Yes, I think The Store is going to be around for a while.  In fact, maybe I'll do my Christmas shopping there.  Now who's the genius?