Shannon Phillips

Robin fell asleep just now clutching Thomas the Tank Engine to his chest. He also brought Thomas to bed last night. His first word this morning was “Thomas!” (he pronounces it something like “Dass”). I think it’s fair to say that the boy really likes Thomas.

This is a much better layout for an almost-three-year-old. It doesn’t use all the pieces of the set: instead I just watched how Robin played with the track and arranged it in the way that seemed most suitable. We ended up with only a small piece of elevation (the bridge is on a little hill) and a long straight stretch of track after, so that Robin can send the trains hurtling down the hill until they gradually roll to a stop. Also there’s enough room between that arm of the layout and the loop on the other side that Robin can crawl into the gap, making it much easier for him to reach all the sections of track without knocking anything down.

When Sam came in to check my work, he said, “Hey, you’ve made a hump yard!” So this layout gets bonus points for gesturing towards realism, I guess.

I took this photo before we went to Baltimore. In our old apartment we never had enough room to set up the full layout for Robin—we’d do simple loops for him, but nothing this exciting. He was pretty thrilled with it. After a few hours, though, he’d pretty well wrecked the layout: I need to build a new one for him that doesn’t include elevations, as those seem to be the most vulnerable to flailing little-boy arms and feet.

We’re busy bees right now. This week we hosted Nanita for a quick visit—she took this cute photo of Robin playing at the neighborhood park. And tomorrow we fly out to Baltimore, for a visit with Nina and Elizabeth and their little boy Silas, and to celebrate as Elizabeth receives her doctorate from Johns Hopkins. I can’t wait to see Robin and Silas interact: Robin’s almost two years older, so it’ll be a little foretaste for him of his new life as a big brother. I think he’ll like it. He’s really interested in other kids now, and generally plays very well with the younger ones.

Of course we’re still getting things into shape on the house. Most of the renovation work is done—the major pieces, like the roof and the fumigation and the floors, are all complete. Contractors and delivery people have been in and out of the house most days since we moved in. Yesterday we got our new fridge, so we no longer have to live out of a camping cooler—and this morning I am experiencing the luxury of doing laundry in my very own washer and dryer. When Sam got home and saw the laundry machines installed, he pretended to be puzzled: “But Shannon, where do we put in the quarters?” I’m sure eventually the thrill of doing the wash will wear off, but for now it’s pretty exciting.

Shark shirt!

Robin’s gone up a size, so I just bought him a batch of new clothes for summer. This is the first of the new outfits to get here, and I think it’s adorable. He likes the hoodie because there’s a tiger on it: “Meow!” he said happily when I showed it to him. Also, “Hat!” because it has a hood. After two and a half years of loathing head coverings—evidencing every willingness to fight them unto the last breath in his body—Robin’s suddenly reversed his position entirely. Now he likes hats. I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with Sir Topham Hatt.

Or maybe it just keeps the sun out of his eyes.

Tomorrow I’ll try and get a photo of his new shark t-shirt, on the assumption that Uncle Jesse will be proud.

Too excited about our new house (omigawd) to sleep, I went through Sam’s camera and pulled off a few pictures of Robin to share. Here they are: he’s wearing a hoodie sent by his Nonna and Pappy, which, by the way, he loves. We let him wear it for three days straight, waking and sleeping, because he’d cry whenever we tried to take it off him.

Then we took it off and washed it, because we are big softies but we have our limits.

I don’t know what that is at the corner of his mouth. I hope it’s not a bug.

Robin and Sam and I went down to Niles Canyon today for their Spring Steam Weekend, and we got to ride behind their Southern Pacific No. 2472 steam engine from Sunol to Niles and back. I was about to describe this locomotive to you as “a very serious piece of engineering,” but then I suddenly had qualms: maybe I was just so impressed by this hulking, churning collection of wheels and pistons and smoke because I’m a train novice, and anybody who was really serious about steam engines would say oh that’s nothing?

So I asked Sam, hey, how would you describe the SP 2472?

“As a big black smoking monster of a machine that rumbled down the track like Zeus himself was driving it,” Sam said, immediately.

So there you go. Here’s another picture, with a human in it for scale:

They had a restored Pullman car for the first-class passengers, but our family rode coach, in one of the open-air cars. The scenery was lovely, although I was too busy keeping an eagle eye on Robin to take many pictures. I got this one when we were going through the yard:

Afterwards the boy got to clamber around on some of the cars that were parked on a side track:

“Look,” I said when Robin grabbed the wheel-thingy, “he’s driving the train!”

“Yeah, not from that end,” said Sam. “That’s a caboose.”

Then it got late, so we went home. Robin passed out in the car. It was a long day for a little engineer!

A couple more photos from the California Academy of Sciences:

My mom took this picture of Robin admiring the pupfish. And here she is with Mark on the Academy’s “living roof”:

Nanita and Marqueño are in town, and Robin couldn’t be more thrilled. It breaks my heart a little bit every time we’re able to visit any of the grandparents, to see how strongly and eagerly Robin responds to their presence and attention: he’s a lucky little boy to have three sets of adoring grandparents, all of whom he loves to the very limits of his little heart: but as I’ve written before, it’s one of my enduring regrets that we haven’t been able to settle closer to any of our far-flung extended family. Robin gets very upset every time we say goodnight to my mom and Mark, obviously because he knows very well that the day will come when they say good-bye and don’t come back again for months.

Anyway, despite my apparent ability to inject mom-guilt into even the nicest of situations, Robin has been having a wonderful time. Yesterday we all (all except for Sam, who has this thing called “work” that sounds like a real bummer, man) went to the California Academy of Sciences for the day. I took my camera and then forgot to take any pictures at all, except for this one of Robin walking along sweetly hand-in-hand with Mark:

For the Buffy fans, I think of this outfit as Robin’s Riley Finn costume.

Anyway, we’ve been to the Academy of Sciences before, but Robin was too young to take much in then. He didn’t respond very strongly to many of the exhibits. This time—was different.

We walk in the door and Robin (after initially getting a bit scared of the big T-Rex mold by the entrance) spots a fish tank. “Fwee!” he cries happily (fwee means fishie), and runs up to get a better look. “Oh, kiddo,” we tell him, “this is nothing, let’s go show you the aquarium.”

We made very slow progress, as to get to the downstairs aquarium you pass by several tide pools and swamp-habitats with fish in them, and each time Robin wanted to stop and gaze at them for apparently indefinite lengths of time. It struck me, as we cajoled and dragged him forward, as pretty funny that his attention span was apparently so much longer than ours. Anyway, eventually, we got downstairs to the “Water Planet” exhibits.

“Fwee! Fwee!”

There were a lot of fishies. So many glass tanks for Robin to run up and press his nose against. So many fishes to be counted and catalogued (“yewwow [yellow] fwee!”). Again, we had to chivvy him along, because we knew what was waiting:

The Philippine Coral Reef. This is a sunken auditorium with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall holding back 212,000 gallons of water and literally thousands of tropical fish.

Robin took this in and rendered his verdict: “Whoa.”

He said that again and again over the next twenty minutes: “Fwee! Whoa!” It was pretty hilarious, because he so badly wanted to talk about the fishies, but his vocabulary is so limited that he was basically just exclaiming the same few words over and over and over again. “Whoa! Fwee! Fwee, Nana!” (Fishies, Nanita!)

He would have stayed there for hours. It’s possible that he would still be there if he had his way. I thought, of course, of Robin’s uncle Jesse the marine biologist—he sent Robin a pop-up book of ocean life, which has apparently taken deep root in the kid’s little brain.

Eventually we dragged him off to see the penguins, and those were a delight as well: Robin loved running back and forth as the penguins swam by, trying to give them kisses through the glass. It was very cute.

Today he’s wearing his penguin shirt that his Pappy and Nonna bought him the last time we went to the Academy of Sciences. He doesn’t have a word for penguin but he did point to the picture and smile. We’ll definitely have to go back soon.