The Countdown Begins. . .

Monday marks four weeks exactly until Micah turns three. Today is two weeks since we had his eligibility meeting with the Child Study Team at Orchard Hill Elementary school - and since we signed off on the 'wait and consider' portion, it's time for us to sign the official documents accepting the placement at Summit Speech School's preschool. Of course everything from the speech therapist coming this morning, taking another Friday train ride with Micah (more on that below), grocery shopping and getting my car's front tires checked out got in the way of calling the case manager until just a moment ago. And since it's Friday, the CST staff probably blew out of there the moment that the school day was over (and I don't blame them), so the voice mail will wait for Monday.

On our rides on the Dinky to Princeton Junction, Micah has positively drooled over the double-decker trains that come through on the Northeast Corridor line, so today I thought we would venture a little bit farther afield and ride from Princeton to Princeton Junction and transfer to a train going to New Brunswick and then return. NJTransit trains run fairly frequently, or so the online schedule shows.

This was the first time at the Princeton station that we actually had to wait for the Dinky, and naturally it had to be the coldest, grayest of all the days we've gone for train rides. It was a good lesson in keeping back away from the edge of the platform. ("Big owwieeeee, Mommy?" Yes, big owwie, of the Humpty Dumpty sort.) Our 'usual' conductor was back this week - he indulges Micah by giving him used tickets and encourages him to ask the driver for a chance to toot the horn.

At PJ, we climbed down the stairs, went through the tunnel under the tracks, with Micah hitting every small puddle along the way, climbed all the stairs back up to the northbound platform and waited for a few minutes for the next train. Unfortunately not a double-decker, but he seemed content to be on a new train, though confused that Mr. Usual Conductor was not the one to take his ticket on this train. The trip to New Brunswick is all of 14 minutes - which works nicely when you have the attention span of a house fly.

At NB, we had to skip the ever so convenient elevator because a man with more luggage than Ivana Trump and a nice case of psychosis to boot was unloading his ten or twelve full-size suitcases. In the station itself the escalator was out of service, so we had to schlep down the four sets of stairs, climb back up one set to go through the tunnel to get to the southbound side, and then once more get in touch with our inner mountain goat and make another trek back up. Only to find out that it was 12:20 pm and the next train wasn't due until 12:43 pm. And the Dunkin Donuts and the coffee that would keep my fingers from freezing off was back down those four flights of stairs and back toward where we had just come from.

The cool thing was that two or three Acelas and a couple of generic Amtrak trains came through the center tracks while we were hanging out, and that kept Micah occupied. The bad thing was that just as we got on the train back to Princeton, one of the double-deckers pulled into the northbound side and Micah was transfixed. He wanted to ride a B-I-I-I-I-G train, as judged by either height or number of rows of passenger windows. By his estimation a B-I-I-I-I-I-G train was not one with eight passender cars (as compared with the two car Dinky, which usually has one car closed off during the times we're riding). Size does matter, if you're Micah.

So he asked if he could ride a B-I-I-I-I-I-G train with Daddy later, as we were getting in the car. Sure, maybe Steve can deliver the goods, I'm done with trains until the temperature hits a minimum of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I still haven't thawed out yet.

Meanwhile, at our pre-train trip run to the post office, it looked like one of my car's tires was going flat, but it was hard to tell since it was sort of parked in a puddle. At the Princeton station parking lot I was pretty sure, and by the time we were in the ShopRite parking lot I was darn sure - and the car seemed to be pulling toward the side with the bad tire. So rather than go home to have naptime for rail-riders, we had to make a run to the tire shop.