"Not cars, not trucks, not other things with wheels"

(Don't panic. This is a wonderful train museum in Temple, Texas. The tracks are part of the museum, as is the train. It doesn't run. It's not nearly as scary as it looks.)

Guthrie likes trains. The above quote is how he described his love to his Grandma Mac (Eric's mom) before her visit last fall. "I like trains. Not cars, not trucks, not other things with wheels - trains."

He has had this love of trains all of his short life, since he was first able to communicate his interests to us. His first real Halloween costume was a train.

During our brief trip to the Chicago area for a friend's wedding when he was 18 months, we ended up at a hotel in Aurora with a train theme, right next to Walter Payton's Roundhouse, and the train station. We rode a train to Chicago, and this was the highlight of the trip for him.

For Christmas that year we got him a train set. Eric, of course, couldn't wait until Christmas for him to have it, so he ended up with it early. It started out pretty small, and on a table.

When we moved into our new house, Guthrie was 2. We still had boxes everywhere, the beds weren't set up yet, but we unpacked the trains.

Slowly the train table got less and less use, and every time we found ourselves in a toy store a few trains and a few more tracks, or track sets, found their way into our cart. The trains started to take over the house.

He got himself a costume so he could pretend to be a train conductor any time he wanted.

For his third birthday, we rode on a train from Warrensburg to Kansas City and back, and he got to meet a REAL condcutor.

Then when we were back in Missouri last summer, we happened to be in the same town that was celebrating its annual "Railroad Days" and got to ride a miniature train, before going to ride on the real Thomas the Tank Engine and meeting Sir Topham Hatt. Poor thing was getting sick, but we didn't know it until he started to develop a fever while we were on the train ride.

We went back to see Thomas in Austin in October, and followed that up with a night in Corpus Christi, where we stayed in another train-themed hotel, and rode on the Great Ocean Drive Scenic (GODS) Railway.

A few months ago, Eric got the idea to spray paint some of Guthrie's tracks. Guthrie then insisted they do them all, and carefully they worked on this together, taping off places that should not be painted, unscrewing roundhouses to pain inside them, using brushes on pieces that wouldn't come apart. Now Guthrie has beautiful, colorful tracks, and we spend many of our days (like today) building elaborate layouts that do take over much of the house.

We've read books on trains. Fiction - the entire collected original Thomas the Tank Engine stories cover to cover (all 405 pages) at least 4 times. We've read many other Thomas books, those we own and many from the library. We've read "The Subway Mouse," "A Cricket in Times Square" (because they live in a subway station), "Pano the Train," "The Little Engine that Could" with 2 different sets of illustrations, "Choo Choo" by Virginia Lee Burton, and so many other fiction books I've lost count. For non-fiction, we've read children's books that tell how train works, and we've also read much of an encyclopedia of trains in which the second half of the book describes hundreds of the great rail lines of the world. I learned many places I want to visit and ride the trains.

I do wonder just how long this love will last. It is fun, and he learns so much, but oh, I've looked at the hobby stores. I've seen the electric model trains. I know how much they cost and how much room they require. And we have a friend who works with the railroad, and we know there is a term for people like Guthrie. Yes, that's right, he's a Foamer.

Merry Christmas

The goods, the treats, and the aftermath.

And this doesn't even show the Strawberry Swirl Cheesecake from my mom (there's still plenty left), half of the goodies (Santa - and my mom - were very good to us this year) or half the mess.

Guthrie is still sick, but better. His fever got up to 104 last night, but today it's been mostly normal, and he was up to doing Christmas. But what kid isn't?

Hope everyone's holiday was wonderful, and Santa brought you just what you wanted!

(And the pictures were taken with my present, a new digital camera that's just the right size to fit in a pocket or purse, so I can always have it with me! Yeah!)

Maybe Santa's not such a good influence after all

My mom (thank you Mom!) sent the boys some Christmas DVDs - Rudolph, Frosty, Charlie Brown, the standards. Turner still has no interest in sitting and watching a screen (maybe if it was bigger than the 7-inch DVD player), which is not a bad thing. Guthrie has been watching them, though, and even figured out how to put them in the computer and start it up all by himself.

He just walked up to me, holding a little stick in his mouth, and telling me he was smoking a pipe. Now he has hte stuffed Santa smoking the pipe. I asked where he learned that (don't think anyone has ever smoked an actual pipe around him) and he said on his movie Santa smokes a pipe. I hadn't noticed that part, or thought anything of it.

So, what do I do? I remember my older cousin and I used to pretend our crayons were cigarettes and "smoke" them. And candy cigarettes and cigars used to be popular everywhere.

I suppose I just let him keep it up, and the novelty will wear off soon enough. If I don't let him, or make a big deal, he'll just want to do it even more, huh?

See, I knew watching TV taught you bad habits.

Things that would have once looked weird to me

no longer do.

The fact that there is a roasting pan sitting empty in the hallway.

The instructions to a "Dora the Explorer" computer game in the refrigerator.

All the kitchen towels in Eric's office, on the floor.

The chairs to the kitchen table in the living room.

And not a single room in the house (bathrooms and closets included) that does not have at least one train.

Really, I don't even bother to pick the things up most of the time anymore. If I do, Guthrie will just come wondering where the roasting pan is, and why I took his (boat, garage, shed, tent) away.

Woo-Woo!

Another reason I don't like battery operated, noise-making, light-activated toys:

When I walk past the train puzzle with all the pieces missing and my shadow causes enough change in the light to cause it to go off, but I can't figure out what the heck that weird noise is at 10 at night, it scares the heck out of me, and I'm sure there is a pterodactyl in my house.

And there wouldn't be batteries in it at all if Guthrie hadn't figured out that the little slots in the backs or bottoms of certain toys hold batteries, which cause the toy to do something.

Help!

Can anyone tell me what the block-like round toys, in the picture below, might be called? I have no idea. Guthrie had a blast with them a few months ago, and so did Samantha for that matter, and I remember playing with them in elementary school. My mom asked about them today, about a possible Christmas present, but I'm clueless as to what they are actually called, and the internet is not turning up any solid answers. So, to all of you out there, anyone know? Anyone? Help, please. Even if we don't get them for him, I'm going to go nuts until I get their name.

Losing the Battle

with the toys. The toys - and the boys - are winning.

I realized that most of my day seems to consist of picking up toys, putting them away, picking them back up, putting them back away, rinse, lather, repeat.

And for some reason, Guthrie's new favorite pasttime is dumping out all of his toys all over his bedroom floor. And today he decided he wanted to play with puzzles. And by "play" I don't mean actually try to put puzzles together. Oh no,not a chance. He wanted to dump out all his puzzles all over the floor. And then, while I was trying to put all the puzzles back together and put them away, Turner had to "help." And by help I mean dump them all back out and scatter the pieces all over the floor. And then they discovered that one of the puzzles had a switch on the back, and still had batteries in it, and they spent the rest of the day making the puzzle make noise. ("How much is that doggie in the window, I sure hope that doggie's for sale.")

We've all been slightly ill around here, too, which makes it even more fun. No sleep, I don't really have the energy to chase them outside, and so I know it's from going stir crazy.

Anybody have Mary Poppins phone number? E-mail? Blog address? 'Cause I'm about ready to quit. Or at least take an extended break. Heck, 3 hours would be good.

Toys

This past week has been one to show us - or at least remind us - that the best toys very often aren't. Specifically toys, that is.

For awhile now, Guthrie has enjoyed playing with rulers. Just plain wooden rulers, which he turns into a million different things - tracks for his trains, roads for his cars, bridges across boxes, ramps up onto higher levels, a pogo stick as he holds it and jumps up and down, a knife to cut play food, a sword to fight dragons, a gate for his trains, he uses more than one to become a fence, or to mark off a parking space for a bigger car.

The other day, my mom reminded me that the space shuttle was going to land, and so Guthrie and I sat at the computer, pulled up one of the news websites, and watched it landing. This piqued his interest in space shuttles (at least momentarily) and we searched YouTube for videos of shuttles taking off and landing (but not blowing up - skipped the Challenger). Then he asked lots of questions about them, and a drumstick became the space shuttle, with a ruler serving as the boosters which fall off.

Another drumstick was an airplane, and he showed me the differences in how the two take off - space shuttles go straight up, while airplanes gradually ascend at an angle. But they both land (roughly) the same way.

We looked through my photo albums, and found a picture of me at the space center in Huntsville, Alabama, as a little girl, sitting in a model of an old space shuttle. He spent hours laying on his back, pretending he was in a shuttle taking off, flying all over the place.

Two cardboard boxes brought in from the garage have served as places to hide, a turtle shell when held on Guthrie's back, a cage, and a home for a Jack-in-the-Box, or I guess a Guthrie-in-the-Box.

Yesterday, I heard lots of giggling coming from the library, and found Eric and Guthrie sitting on opposite sides of the large low table, playing what Guthrie called "Bounce and Roll" with a new roll of scotch tape. For nearly an hour, Eric, then I, sat across from Guthrie sending this roll of tape back and forth, then putting it down and trying to blow it across, figuring out ways to make it roll on its side, roll in a boomerang that came back to us, using a doorstop as a ramp for it to roll down. It was delightful to see the joy and discovery in Guthrie's face.

We have been saving every cork from every wine bottle we use for some time now. (And since I am generally the only one who drinks wine, if you saw our collection, you would be convinced I am an alcoholic. I am not. It is a few years' worth of corks. And I can't recall the last time I was truly intoxicated - certainly before Turner was conceived.) When we visited a friend of ours a few years ago, he had corks, and his son and Samantha took a bunch to a creek and had "cork races." I took a bunch into the bathtub for the boys to play with, and said they were boats. Well, Guthrie put a couple in the "fish holding tank" part of his toy boat, and they were fish. He put a couple in his toy canoe, and they were people riding in the canoe. Another one went into the seat at the front of the boat, and was the person sitting up front fishing (and he reeled in a cork fish). There seems to be no end to what a little imagination can turn corks into. Thank you, Yellow Tail.

A large red plastic container, which up until now had housed extra sheets and towels (which we finally sorted through this week), was filled up with all the balls we could find in the house, and became an instant miniature ball pit. Both boys loved it. Guthrie then hid in the container, and insisted we put the lid on top for him to repeatedly kick off.

We have a house full (really, we have entirely too many toys, although most of them are variations on one theme - TRAINS!) of toys, and again, what the kids like the most are all the other things.