Truck Touching

It’s been a crazy weekend, yet one of those that thankfully ended up working out just fine.  M went to New York on Saturday morning for a sort of last-minute shindig for a friend, while I was up at the crack of dawn working at my local Twin Club’s semi-annual Tag Sale.  A small taste of the insanity: I took a break from helping my friend Meredith sort books to snap a picture. It wasn’t even 7AM.

Thankfully, my beloved sister-in-law and her boyfriend were able to spend much of the day with the kids, and we had a perfectly lovely afternoon (and solo dinner and bedtime) together. The evening was blessedly quiet, and it really felt like a load off to have the sale done.

But Sunday was the big hit of the weekend for the kids.  A nearby office park hosts “Touch a Truck Day.”  All kinds of trucks were there to climb on: snowplows and backhoes, garbage trucks and fire trucks, even a limousine and a big moving van.  Despite cooler temperatures and an off-and-on drizzling rain, we stayed for nearly two hours.  Even before we arrived, Rebecca declared that it was not so much touch a truck as it was hug a truck.  The recipient of her affection was one of the fire trucks:

Daniel had a blast with the backhoe. “It’s a shovel for pushing dirt, Mommy!” (Yes, those were literally his words. The speech from that one is unbelievable… and non-stop.)

Balloons were a hit, as were the lollipops given to them by Bob the Builder. Of course, they don’t actually watch Bob the Builder, so they thought the man in the costume with the giant head was another fireman. I told them it was Bob the Builder, and for the rest of the day they told me that “Bob” gave them lollipops. Like he was an old friend.  And Rebecca actually went up and said “hi” to the (actual) firemen.

It was a little tricky handling this outing with the 1:2 adult-to-toddler ratio.  They wanted to walk, but the stroller was still handy.  But it was tricky keeping them together, not to mention making sure they didn’t fall off of something high.  Speaking of which, one of my more questionable choices of the morning was going with both of them on top of the crane bed. The picture doesn’t do it justice, but it was about 10 feet off the ground and no railing of any kind. It was hairy for a minute, but we all survived.

All-in-all, though, it was a big hit.  A great way to spend the morning, lots of cool things to see and talk about, and close enough to home that we were able to stay almost all the way up to lunchtime before making a break for it. Can’t ask for much more than that on an otherwise gloomy Sunday morning.