Riding the Trains

Yesterday was a day where Mommy was at work, and Samantha and Daddy were at home. We went out to storytime at our local library, hit the bakery for some stuff Mommy wanted, then came home. We sat there for awhile, and an idea popped into my head. We had talked about having Samantha ride the Dart High Speed Rail Trains. Trains are something I recall from my own youth with my father and brother. As you can see of this pic of my brother and I from the 70's.. :)

So anyway, Samantha & I were sitting at home yesterday, and I just thought - you know, why not right now? We weren't doing anything special at the time, we had talked about doing it "sometime", and we had a few hours to kill before we had to go pick up Mommy from work. So I suggested it to Samantha. She got rather excited about it, but when she said "Are we going to go TODAY?", I said yes, and she got massively wide eyes, and and started jumping up and down going "TRAIN! TRAIN! TRAIN! TRAIN!". It was quite intense. From the moment I suggested it until the moment we were in the car driving to the train station was about 10 minutes, most of which was taken up going to the potty. :)

So off we drove to the train station, and I talked to Samantha a lot about how she needed to hold my hand, and not walk away anywhere. She was asking a ton of questions about what color the train was, whether the driver was a boy or girl, how fast the train would go, etc, etc, etc.. I answered all her questions but went on a lot about how she must hold Daddy's hand. Which she did well with; if we weren't sitting in our seats on the train, she was holding my hand. While I wasn't really concerned, taking my three year old downtown into Dallas was something new, and I didn't know how she'd react. Or how people would react to her, to be honest. But we got to the train station, and went to buy our tickets. Even that was exciting to her. I printed out the tickets from the machine, and said here are our tickets, and she went off again, "TICKET! TICKET! TICKET!". But it was not lost on me the moment we walked over the train tracks and onto the station - this was something that I loved as a child and a family event, and then on my own when I was older riding the mass transit system of Philadelphia (Septa). Samantha got up onto the train without much difficulty, and found a seat.

We waited just a minute or so (our timing was good), and the train took off. Samantha got up on her knees and looked out the window. I spent most of my time making sure she didn't fall out of her seat. As this was her first train ride, she didn't have any knowledge of how to balance her body weight when the train took off, or sped up or anything like that. So that's what Daddy did. But I also was enjoying her just watching things. She would look out the window, look at the signs in the train, the other people. I asked her once what she was looking at, and she said "Everything!". On the first leg of our ride, there was an older gentleman sitting right behind her, he looked to be around 70 or so. He would smile at her, and ask her her name, and would talk to her somewhat, he was a nice joy. I know my child can be bubbly, and that's good in my opinion. But I also know not everyone likes bubbly, so it was nice she ran into someone who didn't mind a three year old looking at him. :)

She got all excited when I told her that the train went under the ground. Not a lot of the rail line goes underground, but there's a part where it does as it approaches the downtown area. She really enjoyed that part - I don't know why as there was nothing to look at out the window - was just black, save for the one lone underground station they have on the line. But she loved it, which is odd, as it is Mommy's LEAST favorite part. So we got out of the tunnel and called Mommy, who at this point was on her lunch break. She was quite surprised to realize that her husband and daughter were in downtown Dallas on a train. But Samantha obviously conveyed how much fun and happy she was, so that was good. By now, I think Samantha wanted to see something else, so we got off the train at the West End Station which is a big transfer station, actually. We walked around a little bit, and posed for a picture that came out QUITE well, it's shown here.

The train in the picture was the same one that we rode down in, and as we were waiting at a light to cross the train tracks, we waved at the conductor, who waved back. Samantha loved that too, and started jumping up and down next to me, which the conductor had to have seen. As we crossed the tracks, I pointed down and said look - what is that (pointing directly at the tracks). She said she didn't know, and I explained train tracks to her, which she seemed intent on listening to me about. Someone else apparently saw this exchange, and appeared to be chuckling in approval behind us, which I rather liked, too. We did briefly walk into a store that sold fruit, I thought about getting her a fruit smoothie, but she didn't seem interested, so we walked back out and sat down to wait for the return train.

We sat on the bench by the curb, and Samantha in the picture above showed what my wife said was "your look - Wow does that look like you". Apparently the furrowed brow look is something I do a lot. But something fun while sitting there. Some kids a couple of benches over were throwing some sort of food onto the train tracks, which attracted a ton of pigeons, something like 30 or 40 of them. When the train showed up going the other way, all the pigeons scattered, and flew everywhere. Samanatha thought it was funny and asked why the pigeons all flew away like that. I told her the other train scared them by making a loud noise, so they flew away. When they came back again after the train left, Samantha kept trying to get it to happen again. She'd sit there screaming "PIGEON! - PIGEON!". When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was trying to scare them because it was funny when they all flew away. I enjoyed that exchange. PIGEON! While we were down there and I had three people make some sort of variant of the same comment, which was "I see you have your valentine with you", or "What a beautiful little girl", or something like that. It never occurred to me that we'd get noticed by people, I just saw the entire exercise as "Daddy wanting to spend some time with his Daughter".

So we got back on the train, and made our way out of downtown. There was a younger woman about 20-23ish who sat behind us, and Samantha waved to her, and they talked briefly. Said woman used the idiom, "How are you doing baby?" to which Samantha replied (somewhat sternly, too) "I'm not a baby!" The woman chuckled and said "I'm sorry!" Was actually a sweet exchange. She seems pretty at ease with talking to random people, which is both good and bad. As we start to venture out into the world, I'll have to teach her limits and who to look out for, and all that. But for now, it's quite good. We had talked about Valentine's Day, and that we needed to get home and make a card for Mommy, but somewhere in here Samantha said we needed to go to a store - she wanted to go to a store on the train. So I got off at a stop about halfway between downtown and back home, as I remembered that the place was supposed to have a bunch of shops. Well, it did, but they were the snooty ritzy kind of things, places we didn't want to (well, I didn't) spend time looking around in. Especially with my leg acting up a bit lately, I wanted to reduce the walking, not increase it. The place did have a a very nice fountain system at the top of a stairwell we went down. Fortunately I had a few pennies in my pocket which she threw into the water. She enjoyed that. She's always liked throwing pennies into a fountain.

We made it back onto the train, which involved a very long escalator going up from the platform initially, and then an elevator back down (as the down escalator wasn't working). By this point, I think the lack of a nap coupled with all the excitement was starting to wear, because she started getting mildly cranky, as the train had to stop at one point. There were construction workers on the tracks we were on, and our train had to wait to be diverted to the track on the other side. At this point there were four stops left till we got back to the end of the line where we had parked. With two and a half left, she told me she wanted to go home. This was borne out by the fact that when we did get to the end of the line, we waved goodbye to the train, and then got in the car. Samantha was asleep within 3 minutes of getting the car moving. She had a blast, but it definitely tired her out.

I suppose the greatest moment of this day beyond the obvious joy my kid was experiencing was the fact that what we were doing was something I recall from my youth at a time when my mother and father were still together. Doing something with my daughter that I too experienced as a kid, and loved on my own (as a kid, teen, and an adult) was great. She's now at the age where she will probably pick up a few things that will stay with her the rest of her life, so to be responsible for putting some of those memories in her head was by far the best Valentine's Day present she could have given me.

I love my daughter.