This morning I suggested to Owen that we go to the library. It has been raining all week. Owen's reply: 'No. Mall.' After correcting him to say 'No thank you, Mall please' (if I tried to actually stop him saying no it would do as much good as hitting myself in the face with a 2x4), I decided that the mall probably was a better idea. So off we went. Owen got a big kick out of getting to watch a scuba diver doing maintenance inside the big fish tanks at the Rainforest Cafe and a bigger kick out of the massage chairs at Brookstone. I was enjoying them quite a bit myself until the staff person started lingering around us unpleasantly (what, we're supposed to be interested in actually buying these things?) and informed me that if I am expecting I should really be careful with too intense massages. What a killjoy, I hadn't even thought of that.

After some trips up and down escalators and elevators, and popping into a few stores, I realized that I really needed to get Owen a pair of sneakers, and this might be the perfect chance. I told Owen that we were going to try on a pair of tennis shoes for him just like Daddy's (his first pair of sneakers). Well, who knew this was going to be just the thing to excite Owen...I thought I would have a fight on my hands. Owen vainly tried on shoes and walked around in them looking at his feet and saying, 'Huh! Jus like Daddy!' and 'Like shoes!' and looked with disdain at his old shoes and said, 'Dirty shoes!' After turning down that pair for various reasons we headed to Stride Rite and he was equally cooperative and eager to shop. Wow. The clerk was aghast at his excellent attitude (little does she know...). After we bought a pair and he wore them out of the store, he would walk about 10 steps with his head held high and shoulders back, then crouch down to look at his new shoes and touch them. I was calling them tennis shoes at this point, and Owen's interpretation of this moniker was to call them 'tennis ball shoes'. He would stop and tell me that he was wearing new tennis ball shoes, just like Daddy's. We happened to run into a friend at the mall and during the meeting Owen reached down to touch his shoes and point them out and said, 'tennis ball shoes!' He was awfully cute. He is very eager to show them to Daddy tonight. I told him he could only show them to Daddy if he took a nap, otherwise he wouldn't get to see Daddy tonight. It worked!!! He naps (didn't yesterday).