A taste of life with Mark

The other day all of Mark's neighborhood friends were on vacation.  He had exhausted every interesting option he had--he'd even played Battleship with Emma and read all the jokes in the Boys' Life magazine.  He was so bored that he agreed to go to the grocery store with me.

At such times, with a captive audience in the van, he likes to try out his best ideas on me.

"Mom, you know how people need jobs?"

"Yes."

"They should work for NASA.  NASA needs more people so they can go to Mars."

I agreed that was a good idea but NASA couldn't just hire a bunch of people because they need money to pay them.

"Well that's easy," Mark said, "NASA should have no trouble getting money."

"From where?" I asked.

"They are NASA," he said, like it was hard to have such a dense mother.  "They build spaceships, don't you think they could build...blenders?  Then they could sell the blenders and have enough money to hire people to go to Mars."

It all seemed like sound logic, coming from the backseat from my little economist.  I think he is actually less interested in economics and more interested in being one of the blender building/Mars traveling NASA employees.  He has the soul of a builder.

When we arrived at the store and were crossing the parking lot he said, "Steam turns turbines, right?  Can smoke turn turbines?"

"I don't know," I said.  I don't know, plus by then I was trying to remember everything I needed at the store.  "It seems like your little mind is whirring," I said.

"Oh, it is," he assured me.

He scribbled ideas in his notebook (because my kids all travel with a notebook or novel or both) the whole way home from the store.

Sometimes you just need a ride in the car to get out the boredom kinks.