Reminiscing: Nathan buys the Shark Professional Cordless Sweeper

Nathan with his Shark Professional Cordless Sweeper.

I got a phone call from my Aunt Dot last night.  She had read an interesting article in the Enquirer while she was at the beauty parlor and felt compelled to share it with me.

First, let me insert a little background information.  When Nathan was a toddler, he was obsessed with infomercials.  He watched infomercials, talked infomercials, and wanted me to buy everything sold on infomercials.  Almost every day I would explain, “No, baby, I don’t want a Magic Bullet,” or “I don’t want to spend that kind of money on the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze Quadra,” or “Urine Gone is for people who have indoor pets.”

One day, I was checking my eBay account and noticed that I had won an item and needed to pay for it.  This was puzzling to me because, although I had some things on my watch list, I hadn’t bid on anything.  Upon further investigation, I saw that the item I had won was the Shark Professional Cordless Sweeper!  There was only one person in the house who had been pestering me to buy that…Nathan!

Sure enough, Nathan had pecked out S-H-A-R-K into eBay’s search engine, and he scanned down until he found what he wanted.  He clicked “Buy It Now.”  If you’ve shopped on eBay, you know that backing out of a purchase can damage your feedback score, so I had to follow through.  Within the week, a big box arrived.  Nathan gleefully ran around my house for weeks vacuuming my floors.  A few days later, he got back on eBay (unbeknownst to me) and got into a bidding war for Thomas the Tank Engine tracks–but that’s another story.

Back to Aunt Dot.  She called to tell me that according to the Enquirer, a three-year-old child bought a BULLDOZER over the Internet!  I immediately burst into laughter, knowing exactly the message she was trying to convey:  Shark, shmark…it could have been worse!

[Related story:  My Infomercial Baby]

[Some of my favorite Nathan stories:  Nathan's Quilt, Nathan's Prayer, Before the Back Surgery, The Principle of Finders Keepers, What will a 5-year-old remember about heart surgery?]

Tags: infomercial, Nathan