Another busy week in New Hampshire

The kids are finally healthy. And now my father-in-law is beyond sick. We're pretty much not going anywhere near there until he's better. Sue's been hiding from him too, so she's been hanging out with us a bunch lately to avoid catching the evil pukey/poopy bug. So I took the kids on the trainthe other day. It was Jeremy's first engineering run on the passenger train. I picked on him a bit but he did a really good job. None of us got whiplash :) I didn't realize when I told Ashtyn we'd go that that run was a special one. We were accompanied by the author of A lucky dog: Owney, U.S. Rail Mail Mascot , Dirk Wales and someone in a very goofy Owney costume that I think looks more like a donkey that spent some time under the train but Ashtyn was in love with the costumed critter. She did not want to leave the dog's side, or let anyone else touch "her" dog. We missed out on the author reading the story but Ashtyn, Taylor or this adorable little girl named Sophie along with her mom all had a good time sitting in the end of the car discussing and looking at Taylor prosthetic, or "cast" as Sophie put it. She was so cute. She hugged and kissed Taylor and told her she was sorry she didn't have an arm. And asked me if she cut it off. She definitely had a lot of questions and was very eager to learn all about Taylor. I explained, to the best of my ability to a 3 year old (who hasn't seen or heard of Nemo), how Taylor got a boo-boo while she was in my belly and that made her not grow an arm. A slight stretch from reality but that was all I could come up with and I knew she could understand it. I took off Taylor prosthetic and showed it to her which she thought was really neat and then Ashtyn had to remind us all that it was Taylor's hand and not a toy. All in all it went well though and the kids all had fun and they all got special Owney dog tags, with the date and train logo on them to commemorate the adventure. Oh.... and about my whining about the rain the other day....we had 2 HUGE rainbows because of it..... and we finally got back outside......so all is much better.