My son Michael is fascinated with WALL.E. When the movie opened, he went with his father and some friends. When he came back home, he taught his little brother to say “WALL.E!” like the robots in the movie and started talking about the Wall-E items that he wanted. I’m like, “maybe for Christmas”. He already has enough things and his tastes change so quickly.
Yesterday I received a package from DHL. It contained a WALL.E t-shirt, poster, action figure and sound book. It turns out that I won a prize from a New York Family contest that I entered a couple of weeks ago. In addition, Michael has another WALL.E t-shirt and cooler from a work event that we attended. Oh well, I guess that it is Christmas in July.
Later, when my husband Reggie found out about Michael’s WALL.E gifts, we laughed together. Michael has a way of attracting things that he wants. Really! He’ll say something like, “I want some strawberries” and without asking/before I can go to the store, a friend or family member will come by with…that’s right – strawberries! It’s insane.
Part of me wants to see if it works for the whole family. In my mind, I’d like to say:
-“Michael, don’t you want a brownstone?”
-“Michael, don’t you want Mommy to go away for a spa vacation at Miraval?”
-“Michael, don’t you want Mommy and Daddy to hit the lottery (that they’ve never played)?”
I don’t try to influence his prayers/requests though. I don’t want to mess with the purity (not selflessness, but purity!) of his asking.
On the flip side, my husband is like, “We’d better be careful!” If it were up to Michael, we’d have four kids (one more brother and one sister); a dog and a house full of video games (yikes!).