You Turn Around For One Second/ Stop, Drop, and Roll

I have a boy.  And he's a boy's boy.  He put the "boy"  in boisterous.  Anyway, my favorite little hooligan is quite a handful, and recently, I've had to wonder if I'm teaching him enough about safety.  I am definitely not a "helicopter parent," and sometimes I think I may swing too far in the other direction.  Today, Dominic and I had the pleasure of making a little outing with five stops.  We went to Target to return something and pick a few things up, then Trader Joes, Home Depot, Harris Teeter, and a stop to pick up some things I got through Freecycle.

Dominic was pretty well behaved, with the influence of the bribe-threat combo.  And I was very impressed at how patient he was at Home Depot while we waiting for a staff person to retrieve some totes from a high shelf for us.  We had one more thing to pick up and he was sitting so nicely in the approved position for the shopping cart.  But I turned around for one second and this is what I found:

 

 Quietly and quickly he had unbuckled himself and climbed out of the seat and into the totes.  I laughed and took a picture, but thought, briefly, how easily he could have fallen and smacked his head on the hard concrete floor.

Now the stop, drop, and roll part.  Dominic has taken to throwing his ooubi and dish towels up on the stove top.  I've warned him about doing this, and thankfully, the stove has never been on when he has done it, but I decided that I had better give him a lesson in fire safety.  He is a rascal, and genetically predisposed toward pyrotechnics... from... um... his father.  Okay, that's a pretty big lie, I've always enjoyed playing with fire and it seems to run in my family.    The good news is, he took to "stop, drop, and roll" like a duck to water.  All night I've been running up to him and yelling, "You're on fire, what do you do?"  Is that wrong?  I figure better early, after all, I was calmly able to smother the fire on my breadspread at the age of 13.   Still, I probably shouldn't have showed him how to put out a candle with my fingers last weekend...

On a completely unrelated note, how cute is is that whenever he is getting a piggyback ride he likes to say, "Oink, oink, oink."