Touch-A-Truck aka Wait-In-Line

Last Sunday, we went to Newton South High School for a free family friendly event, Touch-a-Truck.  Not the best sounding name in my opinion, but I guess they can't call it Wait-in-Line or The Horn-Honking Festival.  Picture this: a huge parking lot full of all sorts of awesome vehicles, horns blaring, and people EVERYWHERE.  

We weren't sure where to begin, but I tried to encourage Finley to sit in vehicles that aren't readily available to him in his daily life (i.e. firetrucks, school buses) and so we found a huge crane and started there.  It was quite a climb into the cab, but we made it!

Then we were off to find all the other trucks and that meant standing in a lot of lines with other eager kids and patient parents.

Finley did well waiting for his turn, but the problem that we ran into a few times was that after waiting in line for five or ten minutes for one truck--his eye would have caught sight of a different truck he wanted to test drive.  Ug.  I was often successful at convincing him to wait for the truck we were already in line for, but occasionally we had to bail and wait elsewhere.  All in all, he was a trooper as it got warmer and more and more people were ahead of us.  He didn't mind the horn honking too much, except for when we were 2 people away from our turn in the garbage truck and a parent pulled that horn twice..."ALL DONE ALL DONE DARBAGE" (poor pronunciation, but I got the hint and we moved along).

Finley was an excellent Touch-a-Truck patron, in my unbiased opinion, since when it was finally his turn each time, he'd climb in, look around, move the controls, let me snap a photo, and then ask to get down and find another truck.  Other children were up there for what felt like an eternity and had to be forcibly removed...but maybe I'm biased after all :)

He sure seemed to like the view from up there!

We finally found a "truck" that didn't have a line, the brand new Prius.  Yes, not everything on the lot was a gas guzzling, air polluting vehicle--go Green!

All in all, it was well worth all the waiting in line and getting hot and sweaty.  Finley had so much fun and it was great to be outside on a beautiful day with a toddler who was truly in hog heaven.  I wasn't sure how to include this final picture, it came out so beautifully I had to put it in...so here it is.

I feel like I should have been singing "I'm proud to be an American" while waiting under this huge flag and perhaps it was a fairly All-American day in the end :)