Black Paint, Black Hands

As noted in previous posts, Ethan LOVES working with tools. After we took apart a small book shelf we inherited from some friends that moved, I made a little "work board" for Ethan out of the leftover shelves. Ethan would spend lots of time putting screws or pounding nails into his work board. But, as the work board was made of particle board (read: sawdust and glue), it did not survive long. AND it was hard to get screws to really dig into it. SO, when we were having a cook out with our friends Emma and Tommy (who happens to be a wood worker), I picked up a few scraps of pine from their porch for Ethan to work with. A few days later (when he finally had the chance to dig in) he was focused like a laser beam (thanks Mark Minnett for the phrase) for about 45 minutes painting on of the scraps black. He did an amazing job, and was pretty proud of himself -- I was, too.

Sure, he was excited about the board, but he was REALLY excited about his nearly all black hands. He insisted I take a picture of them.

OMG - Do you see that Train!?

Way back in the beginning of Winter, when we trying to get Ethan to want to poop on the potty, we used a sticker chart as motivation. Each time Ethan went #2 on the potty, he would get a sticker to put on his sticker chart. After 8 stickers, he would get a BIG treat. In made the chart myself on Photoshop and it had a picture of the BIG treat right on it... A BIG TRAIN. That's right, we made an agreement with Ethan that if he made poop on the potty 8 times, he would get to ride on the big train.

It took Ethan a while to earn his first 2 or three stickers and then he went a few months with no sticker earning, and then all of a sudden, he was a pooping machine and the sticker chart was soon filled. We had learned though, that the BIG train we had planned to take Ethan on, only runs in the later summer into the fall. So, we had a lot of waiting to do. The day finally came, we invited our friends Emma, Maisie, and Patrick along for the ride. Ethan's expression above, says it all. "Is that the big train, papa?"

We rode the train the few miles from White River Junction to the Montshire Museum (where we had seen the train the year before and hatched our plan). It was a little bumpy (and a little crazy), but a good time was had by all.


After a good 1.5 hours of playtime at the Montshire, we heard the train's loud whistle and headed back down to the platform to ride back to the station (and our cars).

After we detrained in White River Junction, Ethan went running around the rail yard looking at all of the trains and railroad machines. He would have crawled up underneath one of the engines if I hadn't stopped him -- he just wanted to see how is works. Even the promise of ice cream was not strong enough to lure Ethan away at first, but he eventually came.

After the train trip was finally over and we left the train station, we popped over to the Dairy Twirl for a little ice cream. Ethan got to use the free ice cream cone coupon that he got from the summer reading program we did at our local library. It was a tiring but a great day.