playing cars

Benji loves to play with cars. I mean LOVES. He's loved them for a good year and a half. Pretty much every time we go to any store, even the grocery store, he asks, "Are we going to buy a car there?" It makes him really happy when I play cars with him. And I do it, even though it's not my favorite thing. Because it makes him this happy:

Look at that face. What a funny dude. When we play with cars, sometimes it's only 10 minutes, and sometimes it's an hour. There are so many exciting things you can do with cars. We play "car match," where we match them up by color:

Notice how they are in rainbow order; that was me being type-A.
Then we put them on the train table in a line...
...all really close together.
Sometimes we spice it up and place the cars on this nifty fire truck display case thing hanging on his wall.
Then of course, there's "parking garage" to play. We slide them down the twirly part, make them go up the elevator, all kinds of exciting things.
Sometimes we make a "car maze," which means I line up the cars in a maze shape, and then he makes one car go through the maze before destroying it. He also likes to add "dead ends" to the maze, making it impossible to get through it. No problem though; you just jump the car out of the maze to escape it. Didn't you know that all cars can fly if necessary?
There's also lining up some books on the floor to make a road and driving the cars on the road.

And one of his new favorites is "mechanic." That means I take some little guys from our train track set and they own a mechanic shop. Then Benji brings me cars to fix. Here's how it might sound...

Mechanic: Hello, sir. Is your car broken?

Benji: Um, yeah.

Mechanic: Oh, what's wrong with it?

Benji: I dunno. It's just bwoken.

Mechanic: Okay. I'll have it fixed up for you by tomorrow at 3:00. And it'll be $1,430.

Benji: Okay, here you go.

The mechanic turns the car over, bangs on it a few times, says "Hey, Joe, do we have any more fan belts in the supply closet? Oh, good, bring one out," hits the car a few more times, turns it back over, test drives it, then it's done.

Like I said, super exciting. It's definitely an act of love.