And The Forests Will Echo With Laughter

Yesterday was a really busy day. I'd booked the day off work so that Francine and I could move some furniture from her Mom's house. Alexander was, of course, extremely helpful in doing that, as well as in helping me clean out the back of my truck.

Towards the end of the afternoon, our plan was drop off some supplies for Francine as she was setting up for today's "Mom to Mom" sale at the church hall, dropping off some library books, and heading to Canadian Tire to buy a new vacuum cleaner. (We're really hard on vacuums and I try to tell Francine that we don't NEED to vacuum every day, but she now has Alexander in her corner. He loves vacuuming. Of course, his version of vacuuming is plugging it in for me then running around laughing and pointing at the spots that I missed. He's almost big enough to control the vacuum on his own. It'll be fun for us to switch roles, because I can't wait to be the one running around and laughing and pointing out spots he missed.)

We'd been planning on buying a Dyson vacuum cleaner. You know, the ones that don't lose suction. I know they're more expensive, but they were on sale at Canadian Tire and I'm tired of our vacuum cleaners dying on us and thought that we should get a really good one. These Dyson puppies seemed like just the thing. Of course, Canadian Tire was sold out, but they did have a "knock off" Dyson cleaner that was built on the same technology and which was also on sale. So we decided to get that one.

After Canadian Tire I figured Alexander had done enough work (though he does manage to find lots of fun things to do no matter where we go - us adults have SO MUCH to learn from children about enjoying life) so we headed off to the park where we played grocery store (I bought and ate lots of wood shavings from his little corner shop), played on the seesaw, went down the slide, and climbed and swung on the monkey bars.

On our way home we passed an ice cream truck so we stopped to get a cup of soft serve chocolate/vanilla swirl. We were sharing the ice cream while driving home, and Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven" came on the radio. Since the song wasn't finished, nor was our ice cream, we sat and sang along with Robert Plant while finishing our ice cream. Life doesn't get much better than that, now does it?

But the cutest thing happened about an hour later while Alexander was having his bath. I was humming the tune of "Stairway to Heaven" and Alexander starting singing along. Apparently he picked up on the following part really good because he kept singing it while I was humming: "Oooooooo, it makes me wonder." It was quite precious. We, of course, had to head downstairs and serenade Francine with our song. I'm a pretty crappy singer, but the duet I did with Alexander was definitely gold.

I wonder which songs I'll teach him today. Something from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" -- perhaps a tune off of The Who's "Who's Next?" or maybe the title track from "Fly by Night" by Rush.