Christmas Time

A few weeks ago we took Little Mark to one of my favorite holiday traditions - the annual open house at "The Model Railroad Club" in Union N. J. (Here is their website: http://www.tmrci.com/) They are a large model railroad club with their own building which houses a huge and expanding HO scale layout and a smaller but still impressive N scale layout. Well, I thought at age 3, Little Mark would be old enough to understand what he was seeing - in view of his favorable opinion of my half-baked HO layout in my basement. I was not disappointed. The little dude's first words on seeing the club's setup was "Wow".

One of the things that he really was fascinated by was a working miniature carnival with rides that they had set up. Little Mark, is, I should mention, a big fan of carnivals. This set in motion a whole chain of events.

I set up a small but pretty detailed HO layout in our bay window every Christmas which has a steam train and a trolley car running around in a circle. Little Mark likes this because he can run the trains himself. Now, I thought, the setup needs a carnival ride.

With the help of Michelle's e-bay expertise, I was able to buy, at a great low price a hobby kit to assemble a working HO carousel, complete with horses that bob up and down like the real thing. In record time, the kit was delivered (Michelle gave the seller an excellent feedback rating on e-bay for this) painted, assembled, and running on the Xmas layout. The next time our grandnephew got baby sat, he rewarded our efforts with another "Wow".

Wow - a carousel

The other thing which fascinated him that day was Michelle's Stephen Colbert Krackle bar. She has it hanging on the wall in a frame with the date of the show (see the previous blog entry). Try and explain to a three-year old why a highly edible candy bar is hanging on a wall in a glass frame. Not easy.