Full Steam Ahead

My family never seems to do anything the simple way. I'm sure when other parents wake up on a Saturday morning and tell their kids, "We're going to the park today," it means there are swings and slides and sand involved. Not my parents. This morning I got all dressed for a trip to the park and ended up sitting in a one room clubhouse for what Mom called a "bored meeting" (appropriately named, I must say) of the Southern California Live Steamers at Wilson Park.

But I have to admit, what started as a lot of talking ended up to be a really cool day. Turns out the reason we were there is because Mom and Dad are gearing up to be back in business with StoryTunes, this fun little storytelling gig they used to do before I came along. According to Mom they were really big with the three to five year old crowd. "We had a following," she told me. Frankly, I'll believe it when I see it, but I figured why not humor the old folks.

I do have to give them credit for using their smarts, though. They decided that a good way to relaunch the storytelling gig would be to offer storytime once a month at Southern California Live Steamers when they give free train rides. I'm all over that! The place is so cool. There's a real tunnel, a working railroad crossing sign and some very nice railroad engineers who take you for rides twice around the track.

All of the club members seem really excited about the idea of hosting storytime and they want to give StoryTunes a shot right away. So it was decided that Mom and Dad will do the first one on the next train "run day," which is February 1st, and if it goes well (of course, I'll be there to make sure it goes well), then the club members might decide to do it every month! This also means that our family is now a member of the club, so we get to go to more meetings (which I guess aren't all that boring) and help keep the train park looking nice.

I even made a new friend today. Daniel is a member of the club. He's eight years old and comes to club meetings with his grandma. They were both really nice. And Daniel already knows a lot about trains. I think he was excited about me being there because he took me for a ride and showed me how he drives the train. And his grandma said that they can't wait to help us with storytime.

Dad says this is my first experience with "fil-am-pro-fee," whatever that means. He said it's important for us to help out where we can in our neighborhood. I just think I'm pretty lucky to get a backstage pass to the trains and to make new friends.

I'll catch you later...time to ask Mom to wash my engineer hat and dig through the toy box for my train whistle. I wanna make sure these train folks know I'm serious business.