Sorry for the long, long backlog of comments today. I left late this morning to take my son Lucas to Baton Rouge, to Cabela’s, the sporting goods megastore. Today is his eighth birthday, and this is what he wanted to do. We took along his brother, his grandfather, and his uncle: a Man Trip. My iPhone got jammed for some reason, and I couldn’t get it fixed till I got home, so approving comments from afar wasn’t possible.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to make an eight year old boy — or at least my eight year old boy — happier than to take him to the gun section of a giant sporting goods store and let him have the run of the place to look around. Lucas ended up buying a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun and an Airsoft gun with his birthday money. He pronounced today the best day of his life. He can only make that judgment because he must have forgotten about the crap lunch we ate at Joe’s Crab Shack (“I wish we had just gone to Burger King,” he said). Avoid, avoid. All things considered, though, it was a good day. We came back to the house and had cake and ice cream with the cousins.

Kids are so different. Matthew thought the gun display was pretty interesting, from a technological point of view (versus Lucas, who loves them viscerally), but Matthew only gets wound up like Lucas did today when he goes to the Apple store. When I was a kid, it was going to any bookstore that wasn’t WaldenBooks. If Barnes & Noble had been around when I was a kid, boy, I would have wanted to do family holidays around trips to the city with the nearest one.

As far as the female child goes, if I have to hear one more thing about American Girl, I may move to Botswana.