Riding the Train

Thing 1 is obsessed with trains. Seriously. Any time he saw one, it was a big huge excited exclamation, "Oh Mommy!! A TRAIN!!" In the first full week they were with us, we had tried to go to the Train Museum in Old Sacramento. That was a full on bust. They couldn't climb on the trains, they didn't move and they didn't make any noise.

The Old Sacramento Train begins running in April, so we planned a big surprise trip to to that, and to go to the several kid-centric stores in Old Sac. We drove down, and I let them watch music videos on my phone. Their favorite was What Does the Fox Say? while James and I were partial to Phillip Phillips' Home.

When we arrived, we sat them down to tell them what we were about to do. We had learned that we couldn't tell Thing 1 our plans too early or he would obsess, so we waited until we were just about 30 minutes from departure time. At first he was confused. We tried to pump him up, explain that he would be riding a "REAL Train." Finally, we were waiting in line for our tickets when it clicked for him. He started dancing and singing, "Riding a train, uh, ride a train, riding a train..." It was really funny.

We enjoyed the train ride immensely, except that it wasn't going nearly fast enough for him. Thing 2 enjoyed it too, for the most part. He would have liked it more if I'd let him climb over and under all of the seats to his hearts content; I would not.

After the train, we stopped at the candy store, the kite store, and the costume shop. Then we went to lunch. Their good behavior was wearing thin at this point, so we opted to skip the other stops we had considered, including the zoo. That was just too much for one day, and it was a long drive home. We did stop along the way to have some ice cream. It was a really fantastic family event.