Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Austinisms

It is so crazy to remember last year, about this time, when Austin had just started speaking. Now he's a chatterbox. I'm trying to log some of the awesome things he says before he grows out of them and I forget how much I had to translate...This is by no means an exhaustive list.

San Tozay: a really big building.
This was confusing for us, because he's obviously trying to say "San Jose." And we'd always hear, "I want to go in San Tozay," which we'd answer with various explanations about how we live *in* San Jose. It wasn't until I started hearing him say, "I want to go in *that* San Tozay," that I realized this just means a really big building, even ones in Oakland or San Francisco.

Odershirt: air conditioner?
I'm still not entirely sure what this means, but he tells me to turn it off when we park the car.

Dig Doy: big boy
We still have a hard time with bs and ps. But the reason I'm including this and not everything that has a b or a p in it is because of its extremely specific definition. For example, if Austin is pretending to fly in a rocket, we'll ask, "are you an astronaut?" To which he'll reply, "No, I'm a dig doy." If we press, "a big boy who is an astronaut?" he'll say, "No, I'm a regular dig doy." To date, dig doys are not pirates, astronauts, superheroes, fire fighters, police men...

"I want to knock it down to the ground"
We say this when we're really upset, about pretty much everything. Don't want this sandwich? "Just knock the sandwich over to the ground."
Mom giving you trouble? "Just knock Mom down to the ground."
Sun is up? "I want to knock the Sun down to the ground and break it and put it in the garbage can."

Excuse me: excuse me
He actually says this very well. It's the fact he says it while he bounces off people in crowds that's funny.

His favorite food is currently "hangurgers." He also told us the other day that cookies are best, followed by cake and then ice cream.

He has always liked puzzles, but now he's starting to put together more elaborate tracks for his trains and such. By himself! It's awesome to watch. He'll come run and get me to see his "triangle track" or his "circle track."
The triangle track
This may be hard to see, but it really impressed me. This is a set of 8 tiles that all fit together, but there is a track that runs throughout. You need to line up the track as you fit the pieces together in order for the little guy to run the circuit without derailing. He does these all by himself now :)
He also builds his own vehicles out of legos. This is a train, naturally.
This is a rocket. He's also starting to be kind of bossy... First he wanted to put the rocket in space, so I put some paper underneath. Then it was, "draw shooting stars! draw fire coming out of the rocket! draw the moo-oon!" We also added an astronaut, who you can see through the window piece.

Mom's radio is currently broken, so we're listening to one of our cds we made off our MP3 collection. It's got 150 songs on it and Austin has several favorites. And they now have new names for me to remember as well as the number of the song on the cd.

The Chumma song

The Up and Down song

The Rainbow song


We don't have this song, but if we're watching something on tv and we see this ad, it is required that we watch it about 40 times.

The Singo Dongo song



When it is time to go to bed, Austin has taken to telling us stories. This is one of them.



Amazing. I'm so proud of our little dude. Can't wait to see what's next :)

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Word of the Month

Austin's vocabulary has really taken off since November, so I wanted to start a new series to (hopefully) get me posting more regularly. Unsurprisingly, he loves cars, trains and trucks (or, as he would say, "kas, geens and cucks"), so a lot of our words come out of that. The word for February is... "tunnel". There are apparently tunnels everywhere... on the train tracks, under blankets, under Mom... We have little tunnels for Thomas and Lightning McQueen and big tunnels for Austin...



Lovingly handcrafted by Mom and detailed by our resident artist...





Monday, October 15, 2012

Pumpkin Pickin' Part 1

I'm going to cheat and have this post in October, even though it's almost the end of November. We've been busy! Austin's had school, Mom's got the diabetus, Daddy started a new job... I think we're entitled to cheat a bit. And I want to try to catch up as much as possible before baby girl gets here in January, because I know I won't have much blogging time!

You might recognize this pumpkin patch as the one we went to last year. It's like the Disneyland of pumpkin patches, with two trains, a petting zoo, hayride and a field of pumpkins. Such a treat every year!

Checking out the squash

Trying to taste the flint corn

Posing tragically with a tiny pumpkin

"Zee time, she flies away like this straw through my feengers"
The official pumpkin inspection team

Mom thinks this picture is hilarious




Picking out the wheelbarrow was nearly as much fun as picking a pumpkin


Sunday, August 5, 2012

Austin Meets Thomas and Friend

I don't know if you can really understand Austin's love for a certain train. His favorite toy is a battery powered Thomas, which is an incredibly long-suffering and durable little sucker (at least, so far...). His favorite show is Thomas and Friends. His favorite outfit? This one:
stylin' and profilin'

So as you can imagine, we could not miss an opportunity to see Thomas in person. And ride around in a real train. So Mom and Dad bought some tickets online and were off to Roaring Camp Railroad in Felton, up in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains. It was blissfully cool and everyone had an awesome time.


Our ticket included a free temporary tattoo. That awesome hat was extra.

Hey, is that Thomas?
Wait a minute, I didn't sign off on this...
I didn't know it hurt to get temporary tattoos
Finishing up
Whoa...

Finally, it was time to ride! Thomas pulled a 10 car train and we were in car 10. It was actually pretty swanky, with plush red seats and little chandeliers! Not that the boy noticed...

Prepare to be boarded...
Still admiring our ink



And that was awesome.

But we still hadn't seen Thomas!


THERE HE IS!!!
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG
I don't remember how we got him to turn toward the camera. Magic may have been involved...
But wait, there's more! This is actually the train that took people back and forth to the parking lot. It's over a hundred years old and we totally dug it. Every time it pulled into the camp Austin wanted to go see it... this is Sonora.




When the driver pumped the steam, we could actually see rain coming from the cloud!
I'd say we had a pretty great time.