Thirty Minutes At Cabelas

As our family gets older, the kids are on their own more than they're with us, it seems. This is a natural progression of things, and eventually we'll be empty nesters. Except we'll be empty nesters-plus, what with Micah living here and all. I'm not complaining about that, although he may someday, at which point we'll ship him off to spend time with his siblings for a while. It'll be a good time had by all.

We were practicing that whole "just you and me and Micah" thing over the weekend when we went to pick up the new dog, Frankie. Road tripping with the little guy is always a good time, and I really mean that. Micah travels so well (all our kids do, really), and he enjoys seeing new things. He especially loves things like crossing rivers (he loves water) and cities (he has numerous photos of downtown Pittsburgh on his iPad). So we point out all sorts of things that we know he'll love, and otherwise he quietly sits in the backseat playing with is iPad, or noisily singing to music. He also loves eating out (don't we all?) so he begs to do that any time we're on the road. We generally comply, because why not?

And as an added bonus, we had some time to kill so we took Micah to Cabela's. For whatever odd reason, he just loves that place. As soon as he got in the door, he beelined to the taxidermied elephant, and then just stood there talking about it excitedly. That boy loves elephants. A lot. I took his photo there, and he insisted that I send it to Becky via text. So I did.

Yes, that's a real elephant, taxidermied. No, it's not a mural painted on the wall, although it totally looks like it. Micah was enthralled, although he was totally playing it cool in the photo. He's a stinker that way. (Also ignore the super-long shirt. He failed to take a jacket, and it got cold, so we had to buy him a long sleeved shirt on clearance and I didn't have the means to cut and hem right there in the van.)

After we drug him away from the elephant, he headed straight upstairs to the shooting gallery. I just want to point out that he's been to this store about 3 times in his life, the last time being a few years ago, and yet he doesn't ever forget anything. (Like an elephant!) He knew where the elephant was, he knew where the shooting gallery was, and he knew what was inside the awesome store of Cabela's as soon as he saw it across the parking lot and insisted that we take him there. (Which we'd planned on anyway.)

I was going to purchase some tokens for him to shoot with, but turns out I didn't have any cash on me and the token machine wasn't credit card friendly. I asked the closest cashier if I could purchase tokens for the shooting gallery with a credit card somewhere and she was so kind to hand me enough free tokens for Micah to shoot several rounds. I loved her immensely for that.

Micah tried his hand at shooting and missed everything. I told Sam that someone needed to teach that boy how to shoot, and then realized that DUH, we were the parents. That would be our job. So I showed him how to cradle the butt on his shoulder and how to look down the barrel and line up the dot with the target. He's not so keen on mama showing him things because I CAN DO IT,  MOM, but he really wanted to hit something so he allowed me to show him for about 5 seconds before he was all I GOT THIS, MOM. And then he immediately switched to his left side because that's the hand he prefers. 

I fail at motherhood for never remembering that my son is a leftie.

He just didn't do very well hitting targets because while I tried showing him all over again how to shoot with his left hand, I had everything all backwards and messed up because I'm not a leftie. (Why is that so hard?) He switched back to his right and hit nearly every target he aimed at. (Thank goodness he's naturally ambidextrous, even if he does prefer his left hand.) That boy has some mad shooting skillz.