Follow Me Monday - Toddler Edition

If Cookie were to have a perfect homeschooling day, it would include trains, swimming, and fire. So we attempted to do all three for him on Sunday. 

As soon as he heard we were going out to breakfast on our way up to Niles Canyon to see the trains, he readied himself - grabbing his ba-ba, big brother's baseball helmet, and an old train base from the Thomas lego set that Mom has long since thrown away. 

We arrived at Cafe San Jose minutes later - we could have

biked there really. Before our food had even arrived, Cookie was unable to sit in his chair. At one point, he moved his chair over to the center of the room and attempted to stand on it so he could try to reach the planes hanging from the ceiling. 

Mom and Cookie spent the rest of breakfast in the parking lot.

Once we were in the car, we made a pit stop at Starbucks so Icould have a coffee and a muffin. We had a quick drive up to Niles Canyon, though we saw two bad accidents on the other side of the freeway. Bill had pre-printed our tickets and confirmed the correct station several times, so we were able to board early and get the best seats on the train. Right behind the steam engine!

You could not get any closer to steam engine 2472!

It was loud. It was exciting. It was everything a toddler's first train ride should be.

The little red caboose.

Here is Sweetpea's photo proving we were right behind the steam engine. This is the first puff, before it turns dark grey and starts to smell of burning coal. 

We ran into our old Los Altos History Museum friends {who volunteer at the Niles Canyon railway}. Here is Doug answering questions on the train while Laura manned the coloring table back at the station.

They each got a new glow-in-the-dark steam train t-shirt as a souvenir. Cookie has never had one of his own before, always hand-me-downs, so he was very excited.

On the car ride back home we tried {unsuccessfully} to convince him to take a nap so he could join the big kids with swimming at the swim and raquet club.  While everyone else went swimming, he stayed home with Mom and took a "nap" that started at 4:45 pm. 

After swimming, Bill went to the store to buy the blue cheese and ground beef for the burgers, and still Cookie slept. 

He slept through the blue cheese burger lessons that Sweetpea gave Gordo, through the orzo salad assembly, through the fire-making and burger grilling with Daddy, and through our al fresco dinner.

At 7:45 I checked on him again and he was still sound asleep. He slept through the Chocolate Cherry S'mores that Olivia invented, and avoided the whole Gordo burning his foot on a hot coal incident. 

At 8:45 we started watching Monsters, Inc on our new TV (the one that's going into the cabana) and he missed that too. 

He slept till 7 am the next day! All the train excitement had been more than enough for him.

Be sure to check out the rest of the homeschoolers at www.creatingsomethingbeautifulhs.blogspot.com

She's closing up shop for the summer, so look for new links come August!