We are blessed to live in a geographically rich area.

It’s rich in mountains, trees, rivers and lakes…if you drive a little ways, you’re at the beach.  There’s a lot going on.

And there’s plenty of thrift stores.

Any way you go, you’re going to find a thrift store.

They say you find what you’re looking for…we must be on the prowl for the thrift stores because we see them everywhere.

One of the directions we go when we need to buy groceries is down to the south.  And…you guessed it…there’s a thrift store we stop in at when we’re down there.

One of the cool things about this particular thrift store is that they sell “toy grab bags” for five dollars.

The bags are clear so the kids can see what’s in it…and we usually buy one when we see something that looks promising in a bag.  That way, we can cherry pick the 4 or 5 good toys out of the pile and re-donate the rest.

Anyway…long intro to my main point but none of it would have made sense otherwise.

In the latest big bag (when I say big, I’m not exaggerating…think clear garbage bag)…there was a small snack size Ziploc with about 10 random pieces of Lego parts.

After my wife had already put together or repaired all the other toys in the bag….all her toy triage done in the back of the Caravan…my son found the mysterious bag of legos.

Was this some kind of terrorist vendetta?  Some Al Qaeda plot?   We used to worry about razor blades in the apples at Halloween….who would do this to a parent?

“Make a plane”, our three-year old said.

There was no way in h…

There wasn’t any way to turn this bag of nothing into something that would satisfy a three-year old.

It didn’t have a plane in its DNA.

Children expect us parents to pull a tiger out of the hat.

I know the saying is about a rabbit…but little guys don’t know any of that.  I really feel like tiger probably makes more sense.

It’s going to be bigger…grander…more of a surprise each time.  Maybe it’s conditioning for when we migrate into an adulthood of never really being satisfied with anything…always reaching for some improvement…always hoping for the chance to have the next best thing. I don’t really know.

It’s a lot of work to explain that the little bag just didn’t have it in itself to transform into a plane.

It’s surprising just how much work it is to explain any of that to a three-year old sitting in the back of the Grand Caravan on a cold Winter day at a thrift store just across the border to the south of us.

It’s one of those moments when I was glad I was stuffing mailboxes.