when boy meets vacuum

Luke loves vacuums.

Actually, that is a huge understatement.  He is completely obsessed with them.  Truly.

I haven't posted about this, because I feel like there is just no way to truly convey Luke's vacuum love/obsession. 

It is hilarious, crazy, at times frustrating, and pretty astounding.

He prefers vacuums over anything.  We have yet to find any toy that will capture his attention, interest and heart, in the way a vacuum does.

Luke can find a vacuum ANYWHERE!  His favorite room in the church building, is the custodian closet.  It houses about 5 large vacuums, and several small ones.  It is literally Luke's Disneyland.  He will go in there and just stare at the vacuums in wonder.  Then he will gently touch them and look at them.  Finally, he will try to push them out of the closet and around the halls.  He succeeded with this once, as our ward was ending and another was beginning.  The halls were packed with people, and there was little Luke, plowing through everyone with a vacuum twice his size, completely overjoyed!

Luke goes there every single time we attend church, and rarely leaves the building without hugging the vacuums.

Every store I take him to, he can sniff out a vacuum.  If I let him run free (which is extremely rare), he will make a mad dash for any back room or storage closet, and amazingly finds a vacuum almost anywhere!

Whenever we go to someone's house, Luke immediately locates the vacuum, and will pretty much vacuum their entire house, if they let him.  This makes conversation difficult, when there is a constant vacuum noise in the background.
If we decide that we all can't stand it anymore, and the beginnings of headaches are forming, we will not let him plug in the vacuum, so he will just sit and stare at the vacuum and take all the parts off, and then put them back together.

About a month ago, we were driving home from the gym, and Luke started banging on the window and screaming, "VACUUM, VACUUM!"  I glanced out the window, and sure enough, someone was having a yard sale, and there was a huge shop vac sitting in the yard. 

We don't have a shop vac, so I pulled over, bargained a little, and we came home with a shop vac.  Luke insisted on sitting in the back, right next to it, the entire way home.  If I had really thought it through, I would not have bought Luke anything for Christmas...because nothing he got even compares to his love of his yard sale shop vac.

We all think it's cute, until we are trying to play a game of CLUE, and in walks Luke with his buddy shop vac, and he sucks our entire game right up.  Not cool!  Mr. Shop Vac has also been the home to numerous binkies, chap sticks, marbles, toys, food items, socks, shirts, homework, car keys, and pretty much anything that ends up mysteriously "missing."

In a tragic event that Luke does not have access to a vacuum, he will make his own.   He does this numerous times a week.  He usually goes through all of our drawers with tools, or nick knacks in them, and puts something together.  Most of the time I am completely amazed at his engineering, some times, I want to rip my hair out with the constant emptying out of drawers.

This is today's "vacuum."

 He hooked Ben's camelback up to his toy car.

 He pushed this car all over the house, with the camelback hooked to it, making vacuum noises. 
Yes folks, vacuum noises.  Not car noises, or shooting noises,army guy noises, or dinosaur noises.  Vacuum noises.  Yup, that' my Lukey.

I usually don't mind this. 

What I DO mind, is when he goes through the pantry, grabs the messiest food he can find (crackers, cereal, flour, etc) and dumps it all over the floor, so he can vacuum it up.  Luke's "vacuuming" usually results in me vacuuming, which he loves, and so the cycle continues on. 

Yesterday, we went to Petco.  Kid wonderland...right?  There we were, completely surrounded by cats, frogs, lizards, snakes, fish, and every animal under the sun that kids go nuts over. 

And this is where I found Luke.

Sucker in his mouth, and a HUGE vacuum. 

Paradise.