Questions

There was a good sale downtown today. One our favorite stores is going out of business. That happens when teh world prefers Walmart. But I digress.

When Joey came home and Andy awakened from his nap (wow... he took a nap!), we (Grandma and I) loaded them both into the car, and headed for the shop. We spent some time explaining about going Christmas shopping and that sort of thing, the usual banter to prepare Joey for an unexpected outing, especially on a Friday (his afternoon off, when he prefers to stretch out on the livingroom floor and watch something preferred, such as Little Bear or Cars.) We've been having some trouble with Joey. He's been eching some phrases that have resulted in us emailing the teachers several times to ask what's happening at school- phreases like, "Stop talking now!" and "Eat your breakfast and leave!" and "You're going to Mrs. T!" [this is a reference to being sent to the principal's office]. This week, he's been parroting these things at the bus aide, who was rather upset this morning, to the point I had to remind Joey to be respectful and behave himself on the bus. Joey loves the bus. What's going on? Anyway, theres been a lot of echoing, a lot of motor-mouth lately, and now we're disturbing his schedule again to get 20% off of a bunch of stuff we don't need and possibly polish off my Christmas shopping list.

From the back seat, a musical little voice wafted:

"Where are we going?"

I automatically replied, "Down to the shop, hon."

Fortunately, we stopped at a stop sign. I looked at Grandma. Grandma looked a me.

Joey asked us a question.

There was no prompts, no cajoling, no setting up. It was a question, like any other five-year-old suddenly whisked from his house into the car and heading down the street. Where are we going? Perfectly natural question, especially if you weren;t really paying attention to teh jabber of your mom, talking about Christmas and stuff. Oh, we're going to the shop. OK. He was satisfied.

We were left to collect our teeth from the floorboards.