Finding Trains

Over the summer, I took Tommy out to the train tracks 2 blocks down the street when we heard the train whistle.  Since then, it's become habitual and mandatory.  Even Katie gets excited over the whistle when she hears it.  So no matter what we're doing, we have to drop every thing, scramble to get our shoes on and run out the door to the mini van.

 A couple weeks ago, the we went through the usual routine, but instead of seeing a train passing through, we saw a train stopped for maintenance and a crew of 3 men in a mini van.  One of them came over and asked if we'd like to climb up on the train and see the engine room.  Boy, would we ever!  We got to say hi to the engineer and he blew the whistle for us.  Tom was a bit to timid and unsure of his surroundings to accept the invitation to blow it himself.

 

See, Mom, train!

 

I should give a little vocabulary lesson here for those who don't know Tom's language.  When Tom hears a train, he gets excited and says, "Ahhh!  Mom!  Her keen!" (Hear train.)  And when he wants to find a train, he says, "Mom!  Fuhkeen bibi van!" (Find train mini van).  There was actually a funny story from Utah where it was late at night and we had just made it across some train tracks when we heard the whistle sound behind us.  Tom was overly tired and wanted to find the train, but we told him no.  That produced a tired, crying, hysterical two year old in the back seat, yelling, "AHHHHHH! FUHKEEN!"  ...for about 10 minutes until we got back to Suzanne's house for his castle.

 

Anyway, Katie got to drive the parked van.

 

I really do think she's proud of her messes she makes.  She sure just loves food.  I think those were black grapes.

 

I got to make a wedding cake.

 

And the kids napped for all but the last 15 minutes of it.  Then Tom was climbing all over me to see the cake and I had to send them across the street for 15 minutes.  Tom sat on that horse and cried the whole time until I came back.  Then he got off and Katie wanted a turn, so Tom climbed back on.  Darla and I thought he was being a punk, but he told us that Katie needed to sit on his lap.  He's such a sweet, caring big brother.

We went to the park when Dadda got home from work.  I hope you can tell in the picture that this tube is angled.  Katie practiced and practiced and now she can go up pretty speedy...when she doesn't take time to make faces at us through the holes.