Meanwhile, in the doomed effort to keep track of things ...

Now that the last of the kids' birthday parties for the year have come and gone, I spent a little time yesterday organizing some of our toy storage in the living room. While sorting through the bins of Paw Patrol vehicles and Happy Meal toys (an astonishing number of those, I must confess) and dried up Disney princess markers and random tokens and chits from board games, I found a pair of nail clippers, a monogrammed wine stopper, and the spare housekey we normally set aside for pet sitters (which we'd been looking for a week ago but couldn't find in any of the sane, logical places you might think to look for a key).

Of course I couldn't help but think of good old Lord Business. But also, I wondered what the heck it is that my kids found so especially appealing, if not downright toyetic, about those particular doodads. Of course there's no point in asking the kids themselves; they can't tell me why exactly they felt compelled to engage in something I catch them red-handed in the act of doing. Just chalk it up to random kid weirdness, I reckon. Never a dull moment.