The Moa

Cooper's fascination with lawn equipment continues to grow.  We spend a considerable amount of time each day looking at Daddy's mower, blower, shop vac, and weed eater.  And shovels.  And clippers.  And all tools.  We point and talk about each of them and the parts on them.  He admires them and pets them gently.  He is obsessed.  

The other day Coop and I were leisurely strolling through the toy aisles at Target, when what to his wandering eyes should appear but a...

Mower!

Immediately, he stood up, started pointing, and yelling, "Moa, moa, moa!" (mower)  Cooper was so excited that I was afraid he was about to fall out of the cart trying to get the box!  I've never seen him get that excited over a toy.  So, being the wonderful pushover-of-a-mom that I am, I put the box in the cart and let Coop sit beside it.  He pulled on the string part to "start" it, which was pretty loud, again and again and again.  We were by far and away the most annoying people in the store.  The whole reason we went to Target that day was for swimsuits, not toys, though, so we made our way over to the clothes section (pulling the lawn mower string the whole time).  I needed to try on my swimsuit, which meant Coop and I needed to go in a dressing room, minus the cart... and mower.  Wow!  You would have thought I was amputating his arm when I took him out of that cart and away from his newest love.  Once in the dressing room, he calmed down, but he kept trying to crawl under the dressing room door to escape.  Yes, he was laying flat on a public dressing room floor, army crawling out of the dressing room, all while his mama was trying on bikini bottoms.  It was gross and embarrassing and stressful!  Once he was back in the cart and reunited with the mower, all was well with the world again until it was time to check out.  In case we hadn't caused enough of a scene during our shopping trip, we were about to take things to a whole new level.

When I took the mower out of the cart for the cashier to ring up, Coop threw a tantrum.  It was an Oscar worthy performance.  He had been standing, so he dropped down to his knees, threw his upper body backwards, and screamed.  Arms were outstretched, head back, back arched.  Of course, the mower rang up a different price than what it was on the shelf.  After a quick mental debate, I decided $6.00 was worth fighting for, so I apologized to the sweet cashier as she nicely handed my tyrant his mower back and told her I thought it was supposed to be $18.99, not $24.99.  After a quick mental debate in her head, she decided it wasn't worth fighting for and so kindly changed the price without getting someone to go verify the shelf price, which would have kept us in her line even longer.  And yes, Coop was still squalling at this point.  I thanked her profusely.  My frustrations with my tantrum-throwing child acting like a spoiled you-know-what were reaching a high point, and I looked at him and said, "Are you really acting this way in public?!?!"  For whatever reason, that made him stop crying.  Whew!  However, just when I thought things were all better, the sweet cashier said something to Cooper about how cool his mower was.  Well, my sweet, precious, adorable son decided to throw a cherry on our sundae and roared/growled at her.  Like a tiger/dog.  That's one of those moments when you just drop your head in defeat.  I looked at him with a look of disbelief/humiliation/frustration, smiled as kindly and humbly as I could at her, apologized to everyone around us, and booked it out of there.
Cooper insisted on holding his mower, which in the box was about as tall as him, in his car seat with him the whole way home.  And he pulled the dang starter string the whole way home too.

He sure does love that "moa!"