Your Mom calls the vacuum cleaner "Jaws"?

Just before Christmas our vacuum cleaner died.  This was not the best timing, so we waited a few weeks before getting a new one.  We set out for Target after Christmas, figuring we'd get a new one there.  It took a while to pick the one we wanted, which they then of course did not have in stock.  Four stores and four choices later, we went home vacuum-less and a bit peeved.  A week later the Man did finally find the one we wanted at another Target, and in a lovely shade of blue I might add.

So we get it all unpacked and bask in it's shiny newness.  It isn't very different from our old one when it comes to features, but really, as long as it can pick up dried PlayDoh while it terrorizes the cat, it's satisfactory.  It does have one new feature though, which is the red and green lights that tell you when an area is dirty or clean.  This is really neat at first, but soon you realize that you have become a slave to the green light, ever waiting for it to appear.  After 9 passes over the same section of rug you either stop believing that it actually can sense the dirt, or you start wondering how filthy your family really is.  Take the kids' bedrooms upstairs for instance:  The light almost never turned green.  I kept going, thinking that surely it would turn green at any moment.  As I continued to sweep the same section again and again, I began to wonder if the children had just been bringing pocketfuls of dirt in to dump on the carpets, or if perhaps the sheer age of the carpet had caused it to just disintegrate more and more with every pass of the sweeper.  I began singing 'Roxanne' in my head, waiting for the red light to go out.  I'm pretty sure it took 3 hours to vacuum the upstairs, during which time I sucked up various beads, Polly Pocket shoes and the cat.  Did I mention the suction power on this thing?  And that it's self-propelled?  So it really can get away from you quickly, and suck up all kinds of things that you didn't intend.  It reminded me of Mr. Mom, with Michael Keaton being terrorized by the sweeper. (If you haven't seen that movie, you should!  It's hilarious!)