On Trains, Fish and Pirates

Wow, I really have to play catch up on this summer. We have had a really busy few months and I have been really bad about getting pictures up here! I think that this picture explains pretty well how we've all been feeling lately. :)

It has been a really fun couple of weeks. First Jon's uncle Jim invited us to go with him to a little town called Ely, Nevada which is right in the middle of nowhere... honestly look at the map. He wanted to take us because Ely is one of the only places in the US where they still have a working Steam Engine railroad. They have several turn of the Century steam and diesel trains that they run up and down the mountain and Jim knew that Asher would love it. It was a long drive... and crossing the Salt Flats with a three-year-old and a freshly potty trained two-year-old was quite the interesting experience. I think we saw one gas station the whole time. But we made it!

The trains were really fantastic. We forgot that there was an hour time difference once we crossed into Nevada and so we got there really early. We got to take a look around the Engine shop and were able to watch them fire up the steam engine and get it ready to go. It was SO COOL to see how those big old engines work. Asher wore his engineer outfit-- complete with hat and coveralls-- and was so excited to see that the real engineer was wearing the same thing! He was pretty ecstatic the whole time.

Jim thought it was pretty funny how knowledgeable I was about trains. I was able to identify every type of engine they had, explain what was special about it and what it was used for. I guess I hadn't realized that after reading EVERY train book our library owns (at least twice) to Asher that I've picked up quite the extensive train vocabulary. So I had a really good time too.

Oh, they are cute. They had a great time on the train ride (which was about 2 hours long) and made friends with this cute little boy whose Grandpa worked on the train. Rose is wearing her "engineer clothes" too. Every time Asher wears his she has to wear her overalls to match him.

The weekend after we went to Ely we went camping with Jon's cousin and their family. It was the first time we'd really been camping this summer and it was a shame that we left it till the very end of summer. I got Asher a little fishing pole and he is a natural fisherman. He didn't really care about catching anything, he just liked to cast it into the river and reel it back in. We did put a hook and bait on his line but it kept getting caught in the weeds so we just put the floater and the bait on it and he used that. The cutest moment was when, after one if his casts, the line came back without the bait on it. The bait had gotten caught in the bushes, but he didn't know that, and when he saw that it was gone he got the most astonished look on his face. Then he broke out into a big grin and he said "Mom, the fish ate my worm!" He was so proud.

We also went to Hoogle Zoo a few weekends ago and Rose was super excited about the elephants. I wish that I could have captured her face the first time she saw the elephant. She'd never seen one in real life and I think it was pure magic for her to realize that the pictures in her books were really REAL. She was especially excited about the baby elephant (which you can barley see in the background).

She is really into anything "baby". She will pick up rocks and tell me "baby rocks", she wants a "baby pancake" for breakfast, and every animal we see is a "baby so and so". Basically, she is pretty excited about babies. Which is a good thing because we are going to have one in a few months! But I am a bit nervous about how she is going to handle not being the "baby" of our family. A few days ago I was re-organizing our basement and I pulled out the bassinet and the baby swing and Rose got really excited. But when I explained they weren't for her but were going to be the baby's she LOST it... big time. It was the most heart wrenching tantrum she's ever thrown and it made me realize that even though she is excited to be a big sister, it might be a hard transition for her. Hopefully things go easier then I expect.

Oh, and here is Asher on the carousel. He really did like it... I promise.

And last but not least the last few weeks of my life have been filled up with pirates! I think Asher has a very one-track mind. He gets his little heart interested in something and then obsesses over it for a really long time. It started with basketballs... then moved to trains... and now it is pirates. He has worn his snow boots EVERY DAY this summer because he says they are his pirate boots. He has also been asking me to make him "eye witches" (eye patches) which he wears at every waking moment... even though it impairs his vision considerably and has walked into several doors as a result. He is pretty excited about getting a REAL eye patch to wear for Halloween (he wants to be a pirate... surprise, surprise... and Rose wants to be a bat).

Oh, yeah and they pulled out the snow pants too one day and wore them around, even though it was 80 degrees outside!

What a crazy bunch I have!