The subtlety of a five year old

Last weekend, the holiday Legos catalog arrived. My five year old always gets the mail, so he was beyond excited about this. For the past 5 nights, I have gone to bed, only to find the Legos catalog laying open on my pillow - open to the Star Wars lego page, with a big black marker circle around Jabba's sail barge and the Jawa Sandcrawler. Every night I take it and put it back on the table with the other catalogs, and the next night - there it is again.

The funny part is that as soon as I saw those two items, I knew he would love them and I ordered them - one for Christmas, one for his birthday in January. But I am just cracking up at his Ralphie-esque persistance.

I told my mom this story and she reminded me of the summer when my younger sister really wanted a cat. We thought we'd be all subtle, so we took post-it notes and wrote "CAT" on them and put them all over the house. In the cabinets, in the fridge, on the doors, in the car. For two days, everywhere my mom turned, there was a yellow sticky with "CAT" on it. Finally, she couldn't take it any more and my sister got her cat.

Apparently I passed this gene on to my child. My mother laughed at me and said payback is a bitch.