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Friday, July 22, 2005

 

In search of a giant blue train

I remember when road trips meant throwing three t-shirts, a pair of jeans, some extra undies and my toothbrush into a bag, topping the bag up with a handful of decent CDs, and making sure I had a full extra-large coffee from Timmy's.

I just finished packing up for our road trip with the boys. We have a bag of clothes for us, a bag of clothes for the boys. We have a box for shower stuff, soap, a first aid kit, asprin, benadryl, two kinds of sunscreen and bug spray. We have a box of toys and books. We have a box of dry food, plus a cooler of perishable food. We have a box of sippy cups, plastic bowls, bibs and washclothes. We have a very large bag of diapers and wipes. We have a CD player with lullaby CD for Simon's bedtime, plus of course a surplus of soothers. And a spare baby monitor. And the stroller. And the port-a -baby backpack. And a booster seat. And the regular diaper backpack. Actually, I think we have more stuff to cram into our car than is kept in the storeroom at Babies R Us. How it will all fit into the car is a bit of a mystery, but somehow we always manage.

We are off to fulfil the wildest fantasies of Tristan, my three year old. We are going to see a life-sized Thomas the Tank Engine, at A Day Out With Thomas.

Tristan doesn't just like Thomas and the other trains. Tristan thinks he is a train. He sleeps with the trains, he plays with the trains, he reads books and watches videos about the trains. We go to visit his friends, and he knows who has which trains and where they're kept. (I think he gets his obsessive tendencies from me, god love him.)

I try to imagine what the equivalent of this would have been for me when I was a kid. Maybe if I went to the playground one day and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were just stepping out of the Millenium Falcon and looking for someone to take the place of Princess Leia for a week or two, that would have come close. Not quite, but close.

We'll be road tripping all weekend, and back some time in the early part of next week, so things will be a little more quiet than usual around here. I of course promise a fully illustrated report when I return on what I did on my summer holidays.

Eight hours in the car with two preschoolers... think a kind thought for us!!

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