Recently my dad asked if I would like to have my train set from when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.  Is that even a question?

Of course I wanted it.  I have lots of memories of laying in front on the train watching it go round and round.  And derailments…I had a thing for crashes.

Call me nostalgic, but I wanted this train under our tree bad.  Which explains why even after he told me about the severe water damage and that it might not even run I just smiled and said, “Oh it is totally fine…I love water damage”.

Do you feel my senti-mental-ness yet?

When my pops finally dropped my piece’o childhood off I realized it wasn’t as shiny as I remembered.  It was in pretty bad shape.

Tim saw how my eyes twinkled when I reminisced about my little girl memories.
So he did something crazy.

He pulled every nail out to remove the old-as-me track, striped the board, sanded, sealed, recovered, glued down cork, cleaned the track, nailed a million little holes into a new track, built a bridge, bought a building, and generally got our train in tip-top shape.  What a guy.

He brought my childhood back to life…cue the tears.

We decided on a new little tradition too.  We are going to buy a building for our “train town” every year.  This year we bought a train station, because we can’t have our townspeople just jumping on moving trains you know.  We write the year and a little note on the building so when we are old and senile we can reminisce on the labors of our little town.

I can’t believe the train that I played with as a baby is now up and running and terrorizing our dogs.  Need proof…here it is.