Late night conversation

Macauley was up late last night, after being asked to play next door for a bit around 10:30 and coming home about 11:40...ah, the joy of summer. I was upstairs in his room, sitting on the end of his bed while he shimmied out of his played-in clothes and into his jammies. I asked him if he had fun and what he'd been doing over there and he answered and then said, not in a mean way, just as an off-hand remark, "You know, if you and Dad were mean to me or didn't take care of me, I could just go live next door." I asked if he thought I was mean or if I was a bad parent and then had to rush downstairs to write down his precious answer so I wouldn't forget: "No! You are like...the WORLD to me. I just love you so much, I just can't even say it to explain. Probably like the whole world, like a thousand worlds." I know exactly what he meant. Like times a million worlds...

Then, he segued right into a continuation of why we should get the ADT security system he saw on a commerical, something he'd been talking to me about earlier in the day. As craftily as a seasoned ad exec, he knew just how to play into my deepest, deepest fear and mentioned that if a bad guy "busted" in and went up to his room to "steal" him, that the alarm would go, "woop, woop, woop," and then what would I do? A scenario I have played over in my mind lots of times. Maybe he's right about the ADT. He did point out that it's only $99 and you get a second system for FREE, and then asked if we had $99 or more than $99. I refuse to watch commercials and drive everyone in my family crazy by channel surfing on commerical breaks and often never going back to the show I was on before, but Macauley, he absorbs advertisements and quotes convincingly from them often. If something ever happened to him...I don't know what my world, my whole world, would be like ever again.