Luxuries

In case I haven't mentioned yet, we really like Amazon Prime. It fills our house with little luxuries.

Some luxuries we take for granted, like a steaming hot shower. After seeing our first RGE bill of the winter, I decided to take some cost cutting measures and started turning down the thermostat lower at night and setting the hot water heater to a slightly lower temperature. J has gone along with this just fine, except that she may need to sacrifice her tauntaun to survive sleeping through the night.

But yes, a scalding hot shower is a luxury. And so is one-click ordering. All of a sudden the little things that we don't really NEED but would be nice to have, and yet we don't want to drive out to Wegmans to go and get (we're out of tauntauns, after all) are just one keystroke away. This way too, there's a steady stream of brown boxes arriving at our doorstep. The doorbell will ring while we're at dinner, and then it's exciting to see what came in the mail that day.

"And we didn't spend any money on gas driving out to Wegmans to buy these batteries!"

We need AAA batteries because of James. He needs my little miniature mag-lite to go down to the basement, and also to play in his box upstairs. (The box came from Amazon. It had a carseat in it, which was really more of a necessity than a luxury.) I used to carry the mag-lite around in my coat pocket so I could read in the backseat while in my carpool after it got dark. It ended up on my desk, and James has burned through nearly all the batteries in our fridge.

"Daddy, I need my flashlight!"
"Is that how you ask?"
"Please!"
"Put it all in a sentence for me, then."
"Daddy, give me it."
"I don't know Huckle, you sound an awful lot like Bop and Bonk."
"No, no, no, I'm not Huckle, I'm JAMES!"
He makes an excellent point. And he's using a great arguing tactic, because I really enjoy hearing him say his own name out loud. Huckle is a member of the cat family, from the Richard Scarry books. Bop and Bonk are two rude pigs whose mother is ashamed of their bad manners. In the Richard Scarry books the Mother Pig is ridiculed for having such ill-behaved sons. It was a different era back then.

"Please ask me for the flashlight with your best manners, James."
"Daddy, can I please have my flashlight?"
"You should say 'Daddy, MAY I please have the flashlight.'"
"Yeah. Can you give it to me?"
"Yes, you may borrow the flashlight. But it's Daddy's flashlight. And I want you to remember to turn it off this time, right?"
"Yup."

But AAA batteries aren't the only luxuries we've been ordering. A few days ago J got a big box of nursing pads, which gives her the luxury of not leaking through multiple shirts a day. Later this week we're expecting a curtain rod, which might provide us with the luxury of closing off of the direct sight lines into our living room. What with the nursing pads, you can imagine why J might be keen to do this. Earlier this week we did an exchange and acquired a luxurious new pair of slippers for her so that, in her own words, "at least her feet would be warm." (I'm not sure how long this lower-thermostat experiment is going to last.) I even ordered light bulbs on Amazon the other day. It turns out, when you're a homeowner, that no one replaces your old burnt-out light bulbs for you. But at least I didn't need to venture out into the cold to buy new ones. I only had to walk through the cold inside our house.