Trains

They're Johnny's new obsession. Trains. It's not even a question. Trains. They're Johnny's new passion ... Okay, I'll stop there for anyone not familiar with late 90's Aerosmith...

Anyway! For Christmas, John and I gave the boys a big wooden train set. At the time, they were mildly interested. John and I would build tracks, the boys would run trains on them, and then they'd tear them down. The tearing down, of course, was the best part.

Then, suddenly, Johnny started building the most elaborate train tracks. Kind of out of nowhere. He figured out how to make elevated tracks and would loop them through each other and around in all kinds of configurations.

Just for the record, the track on top is John's.

I don't have a lot of pictures of his tracks because he tends to tear them down as quickly as he builds them. Just believe me when I say he makes some cool ones.

With this new obsession, we have spent a good chunk of time in the last few months watching trains. One of our favorite spots is in Cardiff, right by the Cardiff Kook because there's a beach we can visit for Hank to enjoy throwing sand and our parking spot is in view of the Coaster trains that go by. AND, big bonus, we can see the railroad crossing sign and "sticks", as the boys call them, which may be Johnny's favorite part of watching trains. We also went to the train station in Hampton Bays quite a few times when we were on the east coast to get a fix. And now one of Johnny's favorite places is the trolley station, where we can see about two trains every fifteen minutes. Much more satisfying than in Cardiff, where they come by about every 45 minutes.

We also went to Old Poway Park a couple of weekends ago and brought Grandma, Jack, and Aunt Leslie along to enjoy riding the old steam locomotive there. It runs on the weekends and goes twice around its little track through the park. The boys adored it.

Johnny too excited to smile

Hank and Jack reserving judgement.

Johnny doing his imitation of the sticks at a railroad crossing.

Now we have a game that we play at the park, where Johnny will say "Here comes the Johnny train!" And I have to put my arms up and say "DING DING DING!" so that it is safe for the Johnny train to go down the ladder/slide/bridge/whatever is the track at that moment. Of course, the Hank train comes to play at some point, too. It's pretty cute. And not a bad workout for my arms.