Hello, his name is Wilson . . .

. . . and he's been playing with cars for 5 months now.
Let me be the first to admit, we have a problem. (I hear admitting there's a problem is the first step to healing) I was so excited when Wilson first expressed an interest in his toy cars and trucks. It was really fun to see him develop a "hobby" and a vocabulary to match! Just out of now where he started budn', budn'ing one morning and we were off. He started noticing cars on the road, cars on TV, cars on his clothes. Then there were car books, sippy cups and tote bags. We have a fleet of cars and trucks and an identical "mini fleet" that travels in our bag with us everywhere we go. Thank goodness Baby Einstein came out with "On the Go"- we can now combine our TV and car/truck obsessions. We have cars on our big boy underpants that we wear every now and then. He takes a bite out of a sandwich or cracker and with that magical corner missing, wha-la! it's a car zooming across the dinner table able to crash into the toy car that would have to be surgically removed from his hand before he'd put it down to do anything (including eat). He is now talking in his sleep and can be heard over the monitor saying "brrrrrrrrr!beep!beep!cawrs". We go in to check on him and visually he is out cold but make no mistake- it's Talladega and the Indy 500 going on in his head. Last night he woke at around 3 am apparently from a bad dream and could not settle down. I put him in the guest bed with me and he laid down for a while. But you can't keep a racing man down long and before I knew it he was kicking and squirming and then standing up. I quietly said, "Wilson, you need to lay down". He stopped, gave his paci a good suck, knelt down, got nose to nose with me, and very seriously said "CAWRS", gave his paci another good suck, and stood back up. I'm still not sure if this was a threat or a demand. I gave up and put him in bed with his tow truck and he slept until 10 this morning.

I'm writing about this because this addiction has now crept into my life. You see, the garbage truck "Clean Carl" was covered in peanut butter. (I now know that Clean Carl is a misnomer- merely a ploy by the Playskool company to make a big, loud, scary truck fun. Clean Carl does not stay clean nor does he clean himself- do not be fooled by the innocent grin molded into his rubber grill) Peanut butter was in the indentions of his face and doors, stuck in the wheels, and worst of all in the tiny whole in the bottom that serves no purpose other than to retain just enough peanut butter to cause a mold problem. So eager to get Carl back to the fleet, I squeeze him to open the whole and turn it slightly inside out and with a toothpick begin scraping peanut butter out of the whole. I get most of it- but there is just one crumb left- I give Carl one more good squeeze- catching the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger painfully between the only two hard plastic pieces on the whole truck. Faced with the decision to release my own flesh or get the last remaining particle of goo- I choose the goo and a bruise. Someone please help. Is there CA (Caraholics Anonymous) anywhere? Does anyone know if this type of injury could qualify for workmen's comp?