When my husband and I arrived with our three boys at the L. L. Bean flagship store in the heart of Freeport, Maine, we were already exhausted. Earlier that morning, our two-year-old son, Jacob, had dressed himself in a Buzz Lightyear costume and flown to infinity and beyond by way of his brother’s top bunk and had landed miserably in the emergency room at Maine Medical Center in Portland. “If I have jet pack,” he said through tears of frustration, “I still be walkin’.”
