Career plans

Back in June, my father asked Isaac what he was going to be when he grew up. Isaac gave him a look of puzzlement and said, "A man."

Now that he's almost three, however, Isaac finally has career plans. Today was the first I've heard of them. This afternoon he told me he was going to drive a combine when he grew up, so he was going to be a wheat farmer. He then elaborated and said he was going to be a daddy who was a wheat farmer. (He plans to grow this wheat in our back yard, by the way.)

And tonight as we were having our usual pre-bedtime chat, he told me he wants to be two things: a wheat farmer who also fixes vacuums.

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When we lie down in his bed together to snuggle and talk for a while before I leave the room, I always ask him what he wants to talk about. Practically every night he responds by asking, "Why did our shop vac break?"

Before Isaac was born, we used to own a shop vac. Then one day it stopped working. We were lazy and, not really needing a shop vac anyway, threw the whole thing in the trash. Isaac simply cannot believe we would do such a stupid thing. He wants to know (1) why it broke, (2) why we didn't know what went wrong with it, (3) why we didn't know how to fix it, and (4) if the people who work at the landfill could help us find it now so we could fix it.

I usually try to list some reasons why the shop vac might have stopped working, but it's difficult. Can you name more than three ways a vacuum might break? I usually resort to suggesting vaguely that the motor might have "burned out." Someday very soon Isaac is going to ask me what that means, and then I'll be in big trouble. He already disapproves that we know so little about the small appliances that surround us.

He wants to be better educated than his parents. Today he watched a four minute instructional video on YouTube about replacing a broken belt in a vacuum cleaner.