"To me, you are perfect"

On any given weekend, one or both of us will suggest going to out to lunch or dinner rather then making something at home. Eating out is an enjoyable experience, one which we did often before Landon arrived in the world. Now-a-days, not so much. We have friends who rave about time spent doing various activities with their children (all around Landon’s age) from wine tasting to dining in elite restaurants all the while, they’re perfect angels sit contentedly coloring and reading their books. While Landon is totally perfect to us, his public displays of being a rambunctious two-year-old are far from. We’ve come to realize it has nothing to do with our parenting skills or the fact that one child is better behaved then another. It really boils down to the personality of the child and Landon is not a “sit contentedly coloring” type of kid. He is “GO! GO! GO!” all the live long day.

Sunday after our morning run…actually it was during our run, we fantacized about lunch at Rubio’s sitting on the patio drinking a well-earned cerveza. We debated on whether we wanted to risk ruining such a perfect fantasy of lunch and beers on the patio with our not-so-perfect-in-public-toddler. In the end we threw caution to the wind and headed out. I’m not sure if it was the fact that it was only 11am and just barely lunch time or if the stars just aligned in our favor, but we had what can easily be considered one of the best dining experiences with Landon (and make no mistake, we’re hoping for more like this!). Let’s be honest though, Rubios patio is one of those places that even if he did want to run around instead of eating, we really didn’t care. While waiting for our food (and the inevitable meltdown) we taught Landon how to “cheers!” which he thoroughly enjoyed. He also learned that saying “cheers!” while clinking two bottles together is much more fun (and has a better effect) then a sippy cup of milk. The food finally came, the meltdown did not. To top off his great dining experience, Landon chowed down on his quesadilla. When the boy is hungry, the boy can EAT.

Tempting our fate even more we headed to Target and the market to get the rest of our errands out of the way. One new move we pulled out of our asses was informing Landon in advance about what kind of behavior we expected in the stores. “Remember, we don’t run in the store. We need you to be a good listener.” Looking back now, this works so much better then simply correcting the behavior you DON’T want to see. It gives us a chance to applaud good behavior rather then him hearing “Landon, don’t do that,” or “Landon, no running” the entire time. I think we’re on to something here! For you parents out there who are reading this saying, “yeah, no crap. I’ve been doing that the entire time,” well good for you. We’re just catching on and feel like we’re geniuses for having “discovered” this new tactic. Either way, we both looked at each other on the ride home, did a little fist bump and said, “Hey, that was awesome!”

This topped off our already good weekend. We were able to scrounge up a little dough in the garage by selling off some random crap we’ve accumulated over the last year. While we don’t necessarily “agree” on the appropriate way to negotiate during a garage sale, we were still able to clear out the junk and make some good money doing it. That's the nice way of saying that Dustin is a pushover who just wanted to unload everything in the house (no matter the price)!

Landon had fun hanging out in the garage playing with his cars and other toys and Jack and Guinness were well behaved and enjoyed seeing the people come and go. Speaking of Guinness, one of Landon’s “new things” is to saddle up Guinness and try to ride him like a horse. A week or so back, while Landon was playing out back I watched from the kitchen as he grabbed the door matt, tossed it on Guinness’ back and said, “Yee-haw Cowboy!” as he swung one leg over his back. The poor dogs are far too patient with this kid! And far too patient with me as I dropped everything to run and get a camera instead of pulling Landon off the dogs. Unfortunately, I missed the moment.

That about sums up…well nothing really, but hope you enjoyed our ramblings. Have a good week!!

PS - The first person who can guess the movie that the title is quoted from might win something awesome!!