When my boys were little, they had an out of this world obsession with trains!!!! They watched train videos, had train toys, train books, train coloring books, …. and Thomas the Tank Engine was the most important character on ALL their conversations.
They had Thomas’ pajamas, lunch boxes, the whole collection of Thomas’ die cast trains, back packs, sippy cups,… as everybody knew of their love for trains, and would bring them trains stuff for Christmas, visits, and birthdays.
They use to torture their teachers at daycare with their train stories, and every time they were asked to draw something, build something, talk about something, the result was always spelled T R A I N!!!
One day we went to Wegmans, and OH DEAR!!! They saw THE TRAIN going around one section of the supermarket. “OMG, the train!!!” For daaaays they kept asking me whether they could have a Wegmans’ train at home.
I gave up one day, and said to myself: “well, aren’t you an engineer Yasmin? You should be able to come up with a way to have a “Wegmans’ train” somewhere around the house”. That was the beginning of my career as a mom engineer!
Honestly, I didn’t have a clear idea about how I was going to do it, but I told them: “yes, mommy is going to build a “Wegmans’ train at home”. I figured they had like half a million trains, and track pieces that I could use, and somehow, I was going to figure out how to use them.
I decided that my best shot was to use the GeoTrax trains. Have you ever seen those? They were actually pretty cool.
I could put some track sections together, and hang them with some strings from the ceiling. There, that was the idea I needed!!!
It proved not to be as easy as it looked at the beginning. But one of the greatest accomplishments of this project was to keep a 5 year old boy engaged, for almost an hour, working on it, and telling me some of his ideas, which were not bad at all. We followed more of a trial and error approach, that looked like a complete failure a few times.
We first built the track out of four curved pieces and two straight pieces, and we attached 4 pieces of thread to where the straight and curved pieces joined. We placed the train on the track, and started it, while I held the track in the air by the strings.
I remembered my son and his brother being so excited as the train started to move. However, the excitement was short lived. When the train got to the first joint, the weight of it made the tracks break into pieces. The other thing I remembered very well is this poor little boy saying: “mommy, it didn’t work!”
with a tone of disappointment, sadness, defeat!
I reassured him that we would figure it out and get it to work, and he decided to trust me on that and to keep going. His big smile was back!
Then I thought that we could use the pieces used to build the elevated tracks. We could place them at the joints to keep everything together.
After we added that, the track was finally steady. The passing train was no longer breaking it into pieces. Major accomplishment!!!
However, because we had cut the strings too short, the passing train was getting stuck. I realized that the length of the strings was going to be more significant than I what I had initially thought. Baby boy showed signs of defeat again, so I had to once again convinced him that it was going to be all right, that we were not going to give up, until it worked, because we had the confidence that we could figure it out.
We made a few string length adjustments, and finally the train was rolling down the track with no more breaks or getting stuck.
I ended up hanging it from the kitchen’s lamp, as I couldn’t figure out a way to hold it from the ceiling without the whole thing falling down. Why did I even try the ceiling if there was THE LAMP!??!?!?!
The boys were thrilled, screaming, jumping, laughing, and I discovered pretty quickly that I had found a new eating persuasion strategy: “I want to see you eating, or I’ll turn off the train!”
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