Proud Mary keep on burning

I was thinking of writing a post listing all of the "toys" J plays with, but this this woman beat me to it, dang it. In fact, her list is cannily accurate, right down to letting J play with my camera mini-tripod and the husband's hospital ID with attached keys. J is also a fan of the tape measure and water bottles as well as paper of any kind, old credit cards (or the faux ones that come in the mail), a set of plastic baby bowls still in the packaging, any number of squeeze balls provided for us by various drug companies, pens (especially shiny ones), sippy cups, medicine bottles (of simethecone, which wouldn't hurt him even if he could get in), the plastic lids of baby food containers, our now unused landline phones, and, his all-time favorite, the tightening strap on his Britax car seat, which he has already sucked into within an inch of its life.

True story: At church one day, J and I were outside because he was in a mood, and we were joined by a childless couple of friends of ours. The woman produced a mini-football for him to play with (she always carries it around for just these times, which strikes me as insanely prepared and thoughtful of her), but J was having none of it. So, instead, I reached into the diaper bag and said "what else have we got in here for you?" and pulled out one of the ubiquitous and otherwise useless squeeze toys, a red one this time. "What is that?" asked the woman. "Oh, this?" I said, looking at it closely for the first time. "Oh, just a huge drop of blood, of course." If you try hard, you can imagine her horror!