Roanoke, VA

Liam and Kai awoke as usual at dawn (using I can only assume some form of prehensile solar sensors, as Eric nightly draws three layers of curtain over the hotel window to ensure that not a crack of sunlight can pierce the room, and yet still they defeat every effort at lightlessness and arise at dawn and spring upon us and lay heavily upon our sleep-enfeebled bones and poke us with their sharp elbows and chins until Eric succumbs and rises) and we made an early start for the Roanoke City Market -- 11 am!  Our children find holiday shopping scintillating.

Kai has never had much use for the boundary constructed between customer and merchant.  He poked his head through the half-propped door into the storage room at the back of the storefront where the salespeople had disappeared.  Spying him, one asking whether he wanted her to put him to work.  We laughed in that adult he-he-he way about the unlawfulness of child labor.

Here's Kai about ten minutes later, expediting the cashier's line using the bar code reader:

And confirming the accuracy of the total on the computer cash register:

They told him he had a future in retail.  "I'll be back" he said. We took our little Terminator across the street.  The gift wrapper at La De Da needed some assistance.

At Fair Trade down the block he ferried a freshly unloaded cardboard box to the dumpster - no pics, as all I would have gotten was an image of a floating box.

We hightailed it out of Roanoke before the Department of Labor showed up.

-Juliet