![](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/hizzouse\/q2-10\/evandad.jpg\" "\\"It's")
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I have three days and nights off this week instead of the usual two, and as a result, I’ve actually gotten some stuff done and had some energy. In order to give my wife a break after a hard day, I decided that Evan and I should make a trip into Fort Smith to run some overdue errands and shop for some overdue groceries. Or, actually, do some overdue shopping for groceries that aren’t past their expiration dates. I thought some clarification was in order there. <\/p>\n
To make a long story short, he charmed everybody we met, everywhere we went. He helped me find stuff. He was looking and seeing stuff that I was missing. What a little helper!<\/p>\n
But here’s where it gets scary and funny. With all of our shopping finished, we headed toward Chick-Fil-A for dinner, and there’s a Hastings store right behind it, so I thought we’d swing in there and do a bit of window shopping before going to get our dinner. We made a beeline for the children’s books section so we could pick out some new reading material for him (including a book with Curious George and<\/em> penguins – what could be better than that?). He got a bit punch-drunk and kept letting go of my hand and running away to play hide-and-seek… not a great thing to do in a big building full of people we don’t know, so I was getting a bit frustrated that he wouldn’t stay with me. He was out of my sight for a full minute, and I was getting more than a little anxious.<\/p>\n Then he started calling me: “DAD!”<\/p>\n Uh-oh.<\/p>\n I told him to stay put, I’d come to him. He called me again: “DAD!”<\/p>\n I found him in the toy section, which I was planning on skimming through anyway, since the Fort Smith Hastings is the only place between Little Rock and Tulsa that carries Doctor Who figures in-store. Granted, they usually have the same very common variety of characters all the time, but what the heck – it’s just neat to see them on the shelf somewhere in Fort Smith, Arkansas. At this point, though, I was ready to retrieve my kid, go pay for his books, and hit the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru: he was being too goosy for a sit-down dinner.<\/p>\n See, he’s seen my collection of Dalek action figures at home, sitting up in a glassed-in shelf where he can’t get to them (and you know he’d like to!). But Evan had managed to find me one of the 3,000 limited edition seventh Doctor\/”Remembrance” Dalek packs that were made this year. On the store shelf. In Fort Smith, Arkansas. (Most online retailers had already sold out, and the eBay prices are nutty. This was a limited edition release, and I had resigned myself to having missed it.)<\/p>\n I still scolded him for scaring me (and putting himself in harm’s way) by running away from me like that. But we still both got our goodies – there was no way I was leaving the seventh Doctor in the store! – and went to get some grub (most of which he ate on the way home).<\/p>\n For the record, he also loves his new Curious George and Clifford books. And he knows how to find my robot. I’ve trained him well… though we need a little bit of a refresher on Staying With Dad At All Times. There are worse things than Daleks lurking out there.<\/p>\n Anywho, here’s one last picture of my “robot” to demonstrate how far things have come for Doctor Who fans in the past 22-odd years:<\/p>\n Little buddy, you and me are gonna go shopping for goodies more often (funds permitting).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have three days and nights off this week instead of the usual two, and as a result, I’ve actually gotten some stuff done and had some energy. In order to give my wife a break after a hard day, I decided that Evan and I should make a trip into Fort Smith to run some overdue errands and shop for some overdue groceries. Or, actually, do some overdue shopping for groceries that aren’t past their expiration dates. I thought some clarification was in order there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,3,30],"tags":[29,14,64],"class_list":["post-1896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-and-baby-makes-three","category-funny-stuff","category-toybox","tag-action-figures","tag-who","tag-little-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Seventh](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/hizzouse\/q2-10\/doctor.jpg\")
Evan met me halfway, grabbed my hand and led me toward the toy section that I was ready to skip. “DAD! I FOUND YOUR ROBOT!”<\/p>\n![\"Seventh](\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/hizzouse\/q2-10\/doctors.jpg\")
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