Ah-Ha!!

Okay, so I've been racking my brain on this one for a long time. Well, a week and a half. But that's a long time for me to be thinking about one thing. So...you all know Big O got a train table for his birthday. And we (okay, Scott) has been arranging and re-arranging those tracks for him every night after work because our son can't help but destroy the intricate configurations we've set up for him. And of course, once the tracks are destroyed, O can't play with them and is back to looking to me for entertainment. No, that just won't do...I must find a way to secure those tracks down temporarily and without ruining the table. I certainly don't want to squelch any of his creative juices with a permanent solution. I think when he gets a little older, he will definitely want to create his own track masterpieces, but in the meantime, we've got to figure out how to keep the kid playing. On his own. Without me.

This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. I don't worry about burglars, or kidnappers, or ghosts...okay, maybe I do worry about ghosts, but for the most part, I lay awake at night thinking about finding solutions to small annoyances. Let me show you a glimpse of how my little brain works...

4 days ago, I decided to clean the garage. Let me digress a bit by saying that my garage is a dumping ground for all things crap. On a daily basis, I'll open the door from my kitchen and blindly toss whatever I don't want in the house, into the garage. Days, weeks, months later, I look around with complete disgust at the landfill it's turned into. Anyway, last Sunday I literally could not see my car over the huge mound of stuff, so I went on a cleaning spree. I came across a stash of clear mounting squares that I bought a while back but never used for whatever reason. I looked at them... and you could see the wheels turning in my head, but nothing clicked. I looked at them again, and put them away. Last night, as I was falling asleep, those train tracks kept nagging at me. It was then that I had my "ah ha!" moment, at 11:59pm. The mounting squares!! They would be perfect for securing the train tracks to the table!! This morning, I rushed out to my garage, found the squares and tried them out.

Brilliant.

Sometimes I just amaze myself :)