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“I ate food and then I went on Thomas.”
The weather forecast went from predicting a 40% chance of rain on Saturday to a 50% then a 60% chance of rain. A few hours before we were set to leave, the heavens opened and rain came lashing down in torrents. Thunder boomed. Lightning crackled and flashed. Niko was excited.
“Go outside? Inna rain! I put on rain coat. Rain comin down! It rain on cars. Cars all wet! Tata’s car all wet! I go outside in rain coat and splash.”
We did, in fact, bundle him up in a rain coat but then we prevented him from splashing because we are total killjoys. We took our knapsack loaded up with snacks and water and changes of clothing and piled into the car and somehow — SOMEHOW– managed to get out of the house on time. We drove through the rain and I told Niko, who was yawning and also chatting happily away at us, that we were going to do a lot of boring driving so it was ok if he fell asleep. He told me to stop fooling (actual words: STOP FOOLIN MAMA) and made fun of me a little bit, but five minutes later he was suspiciously quiet. A quick peek back revealed that he was dead to the world. Score! He slept the entire drive down, including when we pulled off at an Oasis1 for lunch and ate in the parking lot waiting for a bit of the rain to let up.
It had stopped raining by the time we got to Union, IL, home of the Illinois Railroad Museum, and we were mere feet from the parking lot when we had to stop at a small railway crossing. Niko woke up and stretched and looked around.
“What dat? Oh. It’s a train! OH! IT’S THOMAS!” Sure enough, the train came along the track, and there was a bright blue cheerful Thomas puffing away! Niko’s tiny mind was blown.
We got there around 2-ish, picked up our tickets, hit the first tent where Niko played with megablocks and wooden trains a bit, and then walked around some. We found an area with picnic tables and Nesko told Niko that he had to eat lunch first then we would go ride on Thomas. There were a million portolets (including some baby changing portolets), and also flush toilets inside buildings. Sadly, we had no cash because we live in a bright and shining futureworld where everyone takes debit cards, and the ILRR museum grounds hasn’t reached that future yet, so we did not have Lemon Shakeups or ice cream cones or corndogs or any other fair food. Niko finished eating and we walked over to the giant snaking lines waiting to board the coaches. We got there just in time, as people began boarding, and trooped on.
Niko was a little wary of the trip. This train was very different from the ones he’s ridden before. But he still had fun and looked around a lot.
We also saw a LOT of train exhibits, walked past but did not wait 20 minutes in line for a photo with Sir Tophamm Hatt, rode a red cable car, walked some more, and Niko jumped in a bounce house for the first time.
He was super wired all the way home. I thought he’d fall asleep again, but no, he demanded and ate a bunch of snacks in the car, and then sang every single song he knew in a desperate attempt to stay awake. We stopped at IHOP for dinner (a huge mistake, the food was bland and the service was… not very good. PROTIP: when you’re serving adults and children, bring the child’s food FIRST and not LAST.) and he was a real handful the whole time, very loud, very antsy. We got him home and topped him off with some more food, then into bed.
We woke up on Sunday and asked him what he’d done on Saturday. “Snakes bite [me],” he answered. Then he claimed he’d gone to the beach. When we challenged that claim, he gave us A Look and spoke very slowly and clearly. “I tooka brown train to the BEEEEEEEESH.” 2 We asked him again, and he said “I ate food an then I went on THOMAS,” and then he talked excitedly about how he rode on “a red Toby.” Toby’s a tram car and we did not ride on a tram car, we rode on a street car. Gah, small child! How could you make that sort of mistake? Anyway, it’s interesting that he lumps eating lunch with the Excitement that was ACTUALLY RIDING ON THOMAS’ ACTUAL COACHES.
It seems that he’s needed to take awhile to process what happened, because he was chattering excitedly today about seeing Thomas, and when Nesko dropped him off at Baba’s, Niko was telling her alllll about it, with great gusto.
He was pretty sold on this beach thing, though. If we’d done that instead we’d have saved about $100 or so. Something to consider.
I took about 150 photos and I’ll post them later. I’m at the point where I’m considering just installing a photo album on my webspace because I have more photos than the free version of Picasa will support. If I do that, I’ll have an album just for Thomas.
- Oases seem to be an Illinois thing. It’s like a rest area by the highway, but instead of pulling off alongside the road you pull off and there’s a gas station and truck wash and 7-11 or whatever… and then a giant bridge spanning the entire highway, with bathrooms and fast food places and Starbuck’s and ice cream and places to buy sunglasses and maps and hats and mugs and all that. You can sit inside and eat and it’s air conditioned and has wifi and you can watch the cars streaming to and fro beneath you. Well, not literally beneath you. The floors are not transparent. ↩
- Note: the brown line doesn’t go to the beach, but he likes claiming he takes the trains various places, including that he takes the orange line to the air port. To get onna plane and fly away an visit TRINA on a airplane at the airport. ↩
Mirrored from Now Showing!.
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Here is a question. Why do you think some toddlers like TRAINS AND CARS so much? Is there something inherent to them that appeals, and if so, what? Or is it mostly marketing?
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In general, I think trains and cars are popular because they are large machines that look cool that the child is able to access and manipulate. Toddlers like, for instance, lining things up in a row. It helps them create order out of the chaos that is their lives. Trains are in a neat row. And they have wheels so you can move them around and play with them.
Thomas specifically also plays its hand broadly when it comes to emotions. The faces/expressions are simplified (and kind of stock, there's standard "shocked" expressions, for instance, and I've seen both Niko and other toddlers make that face when surprised) and when a train/vehicle/person feels an emotion the narrator talks about what they're feeling and the train/vehicle/person also talks about it. So it's like all the emotional interactions have an easy to access handle to grab hold of, if that makes sense.
We go through long periods of time with no television (now... is not that time, especially with other people minding Niko while I'm at work) and even without (or with very reduced) exposure to external forces/marketing there's some things Niko just likes. Trains. Cars. Dinosaurs. Furry animals. Babies. Balls. And most other babies/toddlers I've met seem to have similar... on buttons? IDK. For whatever reason it's ingrained and marketers have very much seized upon that and run with it.
(there is, btw, a toddler/kids show called "Dinosaur Train." It is basically what it sounds like. Some dinosaurs ride on a train.)
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I can't remember what I liked as a toddler (I remember my five-years-younger brother was all about TOOLS and CONSTRUCTION VEHICLES) and will have to ask my mother about that.
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The Thomas stories started out with a father telling stories to his 2 or 3 year old son who had the Measles and couldn't get out of bed or have the lights on. Rev. Awdry was a big train nerd, so he talked about something he and his son were both interested in... trains. A lot of the stories from the books were taken from events that actually happened.
Both the books/tv show Thomas trains and the imitative play that Niko does assigns personalities to the trains. The trains have likes and dislikes, motivations, opinions, have good days and bad days, are afraid of some things. If Niko didn't have trains, two things would happen: he would continue lining up blocks, shoes, etc to make his own trains, and he would apply those likes and dislikes, motivations, etc to something else like cars or GI Joes or something.
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Confession: I worked in a craft/hobby/toy store from 2004 to 2009, and one of our big sellers was Thomas the Tank Engine toys. We had several play tables and ran DVDs of Thomas episodes on the television. As I was never in a position to really pay attention to how the children were playing with the trains, but was forced to listen to the stories on loop and was much exposed to the neverending series of new, ever-more-expensive additions to the trainset, I became extremely cynical about the entire thing.
Now that I've had couple of years away from retail, it's good for me to hear that the Thomas toys do provide useful functions for toddlers.
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One of Niko's watchers really doesn't like Thomas but puts up with it gamely for as long as she can stand it. There's some kids media I cannot abide, so I'm glad Niko's glommed onto one I mostly like... although it's also very dated and just plain WEIRD. Like, in one of the very early stories, a train is afraid of the rain so refuses to come out of a tunnel. The solution? THEY WALL HIM UP INSIDE THE TUNNEL. (He's later let out, to prove his worth.) These are sentient trains with hopes and fears and dreams and one of them is WALLED AWAY. The hell?
The trains also live in perpetual fear of "being scrapped," which is basically being murdered, so are constantly striving to "be really useful" to avoid a vengeful murder for not being useful enough.
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I had an entire theory about class stereotypes being mapped onto the steam/diesel divide, but thank god I have been able to forget most of it by now. Likewise most of my rant about how like 90% of the trains are male (why do you even NEED them to have gender, they're TRAINS gah).
I do like to hear that the original author put a lot of different trains in. I did think it was part of the marketing ploy to start off with just Thomas, Gordon, James, Henry, Percy, and Toby (oh god, I can't believe I just did that - at least they're probably not in numerical order) and then keep adding more in the stories so that parents would have to keep buying more.
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There were a very large amount of trains pre-mass-marketing/toys, however more trains have been added AND existing trains get different (often wacky) paint jobs to push more toys. So there totally is "buy all our playsets and toys" going on now.
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At one point, one of them (percy?) is painted black and yellow like a bee, and that toy is sold.
One parent, online, wrote about one of the trains (James?) getting painted pink at one point in the show, and coming to grips with that, and how it helped his son navigate the social setting of school while also liking to wear pink/"girlish" things. So THAT is super interesting and helpful.
There's a very definite shift in the show where they stop filming Awdry's stories and switch to writing their own with educational input.
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We do more Dinosaur train because I find it less creepy. And it does tend to be overtly 'teachy', but I think the target for those lessons is about 6 months older than Niko.
Thomas is just... like you said, the Trains live in fear of being killed and some of the lessons are a bit WTFREALLY for me... and I'm 38.
But yes, Niko has his own train map in his head. In his world the Red Train goes to the Zoo. And I think it was the Purple Train last week that went to Waldo's house. I was actually impressed when he could tell me the Orange Train went to the airport... because, you know, it does. :)
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Niko keeps demanding we take him on the brown train or the blue train to the park. Now, the brown line DOES hit a pretty nice park, but he keeps demanding a blue line park trip as well and I'm not aware of any parks off the blue line (although I'm sure there are).