Sunday, March 23, 2008

A Milestone


I guess I saw this coming. Mr W was playing on the computer and I asked, “so what do you think of getting rid of the train table?” And he said, “You can get rid of the Thomas stuff, but I want to keep the Brio”. Wow, and in that statement, my kid went from being a little boy to more of a big boy.

He was a wee lad of 18 months when he got his first Thomas play set. It was a slippery slope and we first had the cheaper metal engines, followed by the wooden ones. A friend was nice enough to lend us their train table, and before long we had amassed an impressive collection of more toy trains than any kid could reasonable play with in one sitting. I counted them tonight, and am slightly embarrassed to say we have 41 toy engines of the Thomas ilk. That doesn’t count another 15 or so Brio (which have no faces and are therefore less baby-ish, I gather) ones we are keeping. Holy cow.

And he was a big Thomas fan for years. Family and friends could count on being able to give him Thomas stuff and knowing it would be a big hit. We went to the “Day out with Thomas” down at the RR museum in Golden for three years, most recently in 2007. We own several videos and got others out from the library. A teacher in preschool bought him a Thomas comforter.

Lest you think I will wallow in sentimentality too long, I am planning on giving a couple of engines to the little boys next door, and then putting the lot for sale on ebay. I told Mr W that he could have a cut of the proceeds.

What will he buy? Well, of course he wants a Nintendo DS, but he’s not likely to get one of those for a couple of years. He wants an Airhog remote controlled plane, and he wants a Swype-out racing kit, where you get cards and your own scanner to do races online. Those are OK with me. There are plenty of violent computer games out there, and I’m trying hard to keep those from him (keep him from those) for as long as possible. But the racing stuff is fine. And he’s good at it. Picture above from http://www.postershop.co.uk/

Oh, and Percy and Edward were always my favorites.

1 comment:

  1. Thomas and the rest of those wacky (weird?) Brits are kiddy crack.

    My nephew sings along with his toothbrush twice a day (and at lots of other random moments, like any good 3-year old):

    "They're two, they're four, they're six, they're eight. Shunting trucks and hauling freight..."

    Count your blessings!

    ReplyDelete

Hi, sorry to make the humans do an extra step.