Counting Trains

Typical to his age, P loves trains. He loves to make Long tracks with Long trains and does the cutest "Whoowhoo" and "Chuggachugga" sounds while pushing his engines around. When I told him there were two train exhibits in the city for the holidays he was pretty psyched.

The largest was at the Citcorp building in Midtown. The thing was Huge. An entire victorian building was built in the atrium to house the tracks running with tons of trains. They start in the "city" during the spring and travel up the Hudson through the seasons, ending in a winter wonderland. It was cute to see so many young train aficionados drooling and dreaming at the exhibit's railing. Free, and only up for a few weeks, the operators had to keep the mass of kids moving through at a decent pace so P and I had to go through a couple of times before he was satiated and requested "a cafe." He noticed every little detail and was particularly fascinated by the dimming lights. It was as if the sun was moving across the expanse of tracks, seasons turning to night, followed by tiny sparkling town lights. He also loved the moving backhoe and the itty-bitty man with a hammer, of course!

After noshing some pizza and napping P was ready for the Grand Central train show. Smaller, but more relaxed, he loved standing and staring- for an hour. We also wandered through the train platforms and watched actual trains leave to truly travel up the Hudson. He's done this before, but it seemed to strike him differently this time. He's been trying to understand the passage of time lately, and all of the vocabulary that entails, so he asked a million questions about the pace of different passengers and how soon their train would leave.

Which leads to his other current top confuser: numbers. He likes to throw random numbers into his prose lately (as a faux price, time or train schedule), imitating how often our conversations include the digits he is trying to understand. He sees Ethan's family count objects a lot and imitates that, sometimes with success, sometimes counting the same object twice. He has the verbal string of numbers memorized, but I 'm not sure he really gets the purpose of "counting" yet - anymore than he understands nap versus night or quarters versus dimes. As a label, specific amounts don't seem to hold much weight for him. He will get out his little trains and hook them together. He may count a pile of them on the floor, just for the sake of counting - an end unto itself. But what seems to really matter to him is that when they are put together, they make up a LONG train or a circus train. He has no interest yet in Longer Than; one train having eight cars to another train's seven. While more is definitely more to him in the world of toys, less is still more, because it is at least Something. Its a lovely time in his life where expectations of More Than or Sooner don't really exist because it is all in the Now and all New and therefore More than he knew just before now. But I'm guessing this period is ending because it has entered his play - and with it will come an accuracy for nap/night and numbers. Until proficiency hits though, I will grin like a chesire cat each time I say 5 minutes and he tries to manipulate his little hands to hold up just three fingers and asks "That train leave in this many minutes?"