The boy and the robot

I have three days and nights off this week instead of the usual two, and as a result, I’ve actually gotten some stuff done and had some energy. In order to give my wife a break after a hard day, I decided that Evan and I should make a trip into Fort Smith to run some overdue errands and shop for some overdue groceries. Or, actually, do some overdue shopping for groceries that aren’t past their expiration dates. I thought some clarification was in order there.

To make a long story short, he charmed everybody we met, everywhere we went. He helped me find stuff. He was looking and seeing stuff that I was missing. What a little helper!

But here’s where it gets scary and funny. With all of our shopping finished, we headed toward Chick-Fil-A for dinner, and there’s a Hastings store right behind it, so I thought we’d swing in there and do a bit of window shopping before going to get our dinner. We made a beeline for the children’s books section so we could pick out some new reading material for him (including a book with Curious George and penguins – what could be better than that?). He got a bit punch-drunk and kept letting go of my hand and running away to play hide-and-seek… not a great thing to do in a big building full of people we don’t know, so I was getting a bit frustrated that he wouldn’t stay with me. He was out of my sight for a full minute, and I was getting more than a little anxious.

Then he started calling me: “DAD!”

Uh-oh.

I told him to stay put, I’d come to him. He called me again: “DAD!”

I found him in the toy section, which I was planning on skimming through anyway, since the Fort Smith Hastings is the only place between Little Rock and Tulsa that carries Doctor Who figures in-store. Granted, they usually have the same very common variety of characters all the time, but what the heck – it’s just neat to see them on the shelf somewhere in Fort Smith, Arkansas. At this point, though, I was ready to retrieve my kid, go pay for his books, and hit the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru: he was being too goosy for a sit-down dinner.

Evan met me halfway, grabbed my hand and led me toward the toy section that I was ready to skip. “DAD! I FOUND YOUR ROBOT!”

See, he’s seen my collection of Dalek action figures at home, sitting up in a glassed-in shelf where he can’t get to them (and you know he’d like to!). But Evan had managed to find me one of the 3,000 limited edition seventh Doctor/”Remembrance” Dalek packs that were made this year. On the store shelf. In Fort Smith, Arkansas. (Most online retailers had already sold out, and the eBay prices are nutty. This was a limited edition release, and I had resigned myself to having missed it.)

I still scolded him for scaring me (and putting himself in harm’s way) by running away from me like that. But we still both got our goodies – there was no way I was leaving the seventh Doctor in the store! – and went to get some grub (most of which he ate on the way home).

For the record, he also loves his new Curious George and Clifford books. And he knows how to find my robot. I’ve trained him well… though we need a little bit of a refresher on Staying With Dad At All Times. There are worse things than Daleks lurking out there.

Anywho, here’s one last picture of my “robot” to demonstrate how far things have come for Doctor Who fans in the past 22-odd years:

Little buddy, you and me are gonna go shopping for goodies more often (funds permitting).