meanwhile, adventures in parenting and adulting (which are not always the same)

[darthfox]

• The prince, who is four and a half, can climb into his own car seat (he's been able to do this for ages now) and, in a recent development, do up his own buckles.
  
• He cannot (yet) (fortunately) undo the buckles by himself.
  
• But he's committed to the scientific process, and having seen me undo the buckles, even doing so very quickly so he can't make an in-depth study of the process, he's almost figured out what he needs to do; still more fortunately, his little hands are not yet strong enough to do it.
  
• Nevertheless, yesterday I had to tell him I was not going to start the car until he stopped investigating the chest clip (which will be easier to undo than the lower seatbelt-style buckle). Hands absolutely off the clip. The car will not move until your hands are in your lap. Thank you.
  
• "I wish I had a seat belt," he said, pronouncing the t's very thoroughly, after he saw me buckle my own seatbelt. I pointed out that he did have, that's what his straps and buckles are, and he was pleased to hear it (rather than insisting that he wanted a shoulder-and-lap arrangement like mine, thank god). "What's it for?" It's for keeping us safe, which is why it has to be tight enough to touch us, because otherwise it couldn't catch us in a sudden stop. And I stopped the car a little more suddenly than I usually do at the next stop sign, so he could feel a little bit of what that's like (and I also pointed out that my bag tipped over and my phone fell on the floor). And that is why we never, ever take the seatbelt off when the car is moving, unless there's a really big emergency; normally we don't unfasten it until we get where we're going and the car is turned off, got it? "Got it, Mommy." [whew]

• Last time she was here, the cleaning lady told me the bag in my trusty 20-year-old vacuum was full, and I made a note to find the replacement bags ... somewhere ... and promptly forgot about it until she arrived again today.
  
• Fortunately, she also brings her own vacuum. (Plus we have another vacuum in the house, but I don't think it's as good. It is Himself's lighter and more maneuverable Dyson bagless and it just doesn't vac the way the 1999 Hoover does.)
  
• So I went to the Big River to order more vacuum bags and realized I don't actually know what kind of bags the thing takes. Looked all over the object and could find no label with this information. Seems like a biggish oversight. The tires on my car tell me what pressure to inflate them to; shouldn't the vacuum tell me what kind of parts it takes? (Given that they're not entirely standardized, which is also silly.)
  
• Hoover dot com has a live chat option that wasn't working, so I had to call on the phone. Fortunately I didn't have to wait long, and the young woman who answered had to go do some research with all the details I was able to give her, which didn't include the actual model number, because I couldn't find that either.
  
• Almost as soon as she put me back on hold, I did find the place on the vacuum where it tells me the bag type - inside the bag holding area, in raised print that's almost necessarily in shadow, so black-on-black and hard to see. But I found it.
  
• And then waited for her to come back so I could thank her for hunting up the information for me. (Which her conclusion lined up with what I found myself, so that's good.)
  
• Several months ago, I leaned back too far in my desk chair and fell over backwards and was not at all hurt and thought the chair was undamaged also, but it turns out the screw housings holding the headrest on its stalk had cracked in enough places that last week when I was trying to adjust the headrest it just came off in my hands.
  
• The chair still works fine, but I miss having a headrest, so I'm contemplating which new chair to get. Just when we're on the cusp of probably going back to the office 40ish percent of the time seems an odd time to invest in a particularly nice desk chair for my home, but.