Big Truck Day

Yesterday started off early, with Zane waking up crying a little after five. I managed to get him calmed down, laying down on the race car bed with him (one nice benefit). Yet even after forty minutes there was no going back to sleep for either of us. Rather than crash around the house and wake up his mommy we headed out for breakfast.

And where do two rough and tumble dudes go at 6am for breakfast? The truck stop, of course!

Did you know they have trucks at the truck stop? We walked all over the place, looking at every wheel, hydraulic hose, fuel tank, and tail light just to assure each other that there were TRUCKS, by golly, TRUCKS EVERYWHERE! Hard to eat breakfast when you know you are surrounded by trucks, but we managed to put down some blueberry pancakes, spuds, eggs and a great big cup of OJ.

Before and after the meal Zane kept trying to crawl over me and out of the booth, repeating: “must look.” Not sure what he thought he “must look” at, but he did check out the cakes “cake, cake!” and some xmas lights on a fake office plant. After breakfast we headed out to, you’ll never guess, look at more trucks! One of the truck drivers honked his horn for Zane, nearly scaring him out of his already-almost-falling-off pants.

Back home we took Raz for a hike on the little woods trail and then the three of us piled into the minivan and headed off in search of adventure. First stop was the farm supply store where, as luck would have it, a big excavator was ripping up pavement and dumping it into a dump truck. You couldn’t ask for a more appropriate Saturday morning adventure for a two year old. He even sat down on the pavement to watch, apparently expecting to spend the day soaking in the wall of noise and stilted ballet of it all. But we had dog food to buy and eventually made it into the store … where he quickly found the tractor section.

We then ran up and down aisles at the local *mart, our alternate exercise plan since the playground was all wet. I was about ready to take him on a hike near the house when his head started bobbling in the tell-tale falling asleep pattern. Got him home and fed just in time before the long morning and ample exercise pushed him into an early nap. Later that afternoon we headed to the playground.

Zane’s not so much into sliding as he used to be. The two of us slid down the big spiral slide a few times, but that was about it. He did reach a major milestone: making it up the wobbly chain ladder all on his own. Not just once, but three times. He’s still a little bit stuck on the “foot holes in a vertical wall” ladder right above it, but it’s only a matter of time. He didn’t want any help on the ladder, in fact the whole day was independence from help day. Zane climbed the monkey bars again, or what this company calls quad- or fire-station climber. The center is well over six feet high, so you can imagine how fun that is when Zane approaches the top. As a point of reference my Mom says that I climbed our garage when I was three and was going to fly off. She didn’t let me watch Superman after that.

Here’s a little movie from parts of Saturday.