first ride

I've been hearing it all day. "We going to the fair, Mommy" and "Let's go to the fair" and other variations on the same theme. He had to wait several hours, though. David got home from work and opened up our pop-up camper to begin preparing for our upcoming camping trip. When we discovered an entire planet's worth of different experimental molds growing in the thing, we cancelled our plans. It's going to take some real clean-up and possibly some plywood to make it campable again, which was disappointing but not devastating (because now we can remodel it just like we want to but probably can't use it for the rest of this camping season due to a hundred other more important projects on our list). When we were assessing the damage, we rescued the vintage Fisher Price toy camper set from inside it. Dennis was thrilled to be reunited with it and spent two entire hours playing with it exclusively, including making the Little People say phrases like the following plus hundreds more:

"Let's go on a picnic"; "Want some more corn--here you go"; "let's ride the motorcycles"; "this steak is deewishus"; "everybody get in the boat"; "Hey, Dog, are you okay? Woof woof, I'm okay thank you". It was enchanting just to watch and listen. And it was major trauma to separate him from the toys to go to the fair, so we shamelessly bribed him with supper at McDonald's. We took Uncle Denny to the fair with us, and when he pointed out the approaching midway lights to Dennis, Dennis said "look at the BIG playground!". He loved looking around and dancing along and jumping up and down, just enchanted with all the sights and smells and sounds of the fair. He played a game of 'turn-over-a-duck' and won a little stuff orange dog. He rode the teacups and LOVED it. He didn't want to at first--he spotted the bigger and scarier rides on either side of the teacups and wanted to ride those instead, the ones that went fast and upside down and had strobe lights and sirens and VERY loud music. Since he is not quite 42" tall, he had to settle for riding the teacups with Mommy and Daddy. We sat down in our blue cup and he began to grin and giggle and say "we're going to go around and around!". Another little boy hopped in with us, and he and Dennis laughed and smiled at each other and 'helped' us spin the wheel to make the cup spin around faster. He loved it for 90% of the ride, and then he said "STOP" and then "turn it off, Mommy" until I told him that it would be over soon. Then he said "okay" and began spinning the wheel again. After this, he told us "it's time to go home now" and we did. Sure was a fun evening, and we're tickled that he loved his first amusement ride. We're hoping he'll grow up to ride the coasters with us!