Happy 5th Birthday

This story is hard to tell because I am not going to tell all of it. The part you get to hear is that we took the girls for a ride on a narrow gauge steam train for their birthday. There’s some backstory as to why, which involves a very long and, while they don’t know it yet, probably never-ending, story about two girls not unlike them. But also not entirely like them. Suffice to say that the train fits into that story in ways that I will not go into here.

I suppose I could just be like most people, and just tell you we went on the narrow gauge railway from Durango to Silverton. It’s a common enough thing to do around these parts. It draws tourists from all over (one of whom I watched doing their YouTube review right after they got of the train which, while I know is a thing some travelers do, is still so weird to me that I can’t help staring — why are you talking to your phone?) and I still remember it from when I did it as a kid.

Since we didn’t want them to spend their whole birthday stuck on a train, we rode it the day before. Their actual birthday they got up early and pretty much fell over each other in a rush to give each other the gifts they had picked out.

Their birthday was a little bittersweet because our friends whom the kids had been playing with pretty much every day for two weeks, had to leave. They stayed long enough to have birthday breakfast and then hit the road. I’m pretty sure our paths will probably cross again, that tends to happen when you travel, but in the mean time it was suddenly strangely quiet, and a little bit lonely, around camp.

Elliott was fine for 99 percent of the day, but when there were presents for his sisters and not for him, he lost it for a minute.

But a little while later they were sharing all their new things with him and everything was fine again.

Every since we invented chocolate waffle cake the girls have been asking for it for their birthday. The only problem was that we don’t have hookups here and we don’t have an inverter. About 99 percent of the time that doesn’t matter, but today it did. Fortunately the camp hosts, whom we’d made friends with, offered to let us make waffles at their RV. Thank you Tim and Zaida.

And then, new friends gone, birthday over, it was back to what they do every day, running around, playing in the forest. It never ceases to amaze me how well all three of them get along. They have their moments of course, but by and large they play together all day every day.