What is it about little boys and trains?
Elias' current favorite book is "Tootle," a Christmas present from his aunt & uncle. It's actually a "big kid book" with paper pages, some of which are almost entirely text, with minimal pictures. I'm not sure why he likes it (I'm not particularly fond of it myself), but there's no doubt he does. When I ask if he wants to read a book he'll often say "Tootle?" and run to get it. He sometimes spells out the title for me, pointing at each letter in sequence, and occasionally picks out favorite letters from the text. He seems to grasp that I'm getting the words I say somehow from those letters on the page. He likes pointing out the horse "horse: neigh!" and the mayor "mayr," and on the first page, half-way through the first paragraph, saying "ToooOooot!" with me, at precisely the right time. He also usually counts out the red flags in one picture, and yesterday even used words as he slowly counted them off: "one...two...three...(ugh)...five...six..(ugh)..eight"!
When I dropped him off at daycare yesterday that he ran and got a Thomas the Train book, brought it to his teacher, and plopped himself down on her lap to be read to. So I guess I should get more train books. I'm not even sure he's seen a real train. Will he be disappointed when he discovers they don't really have faces on the front engine and talk?
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When you tell Elias that trains can't actually talk, make sure you also tell him about Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, the intellectual tenability of metaphysical naturalism, etc. No point in keeping any of the big secrets from him.
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