Friday, August 14, 2009

The Giant Excavator

Sadie loves tractors. She has sat on Grumpa's tractor twice, but really, the first time she saw the old red Yanmar puttering around the horse corral, it was love at first sight. However, Sadie's love of tractors isn't limited to Grumpa's tractor. It extends to tractor toys, to the tractors in books and to the tractors and heavy machinery that we drive by that are parked, or working, at the side of the freeway.

And that is why today was a very good day. We drove into Redding for the first time in over a week. Sadie was excited to be in the car (I think she can see better in the subaru because the car is up higher and the dashboard is narrower). She started giggling before we made it to our little town, and was pretty hysterical by the time we started to go past the major freeway reconstruction that's going on up on the summit. When we came to a stop for road work Nani gave Sadie the book that I had packed in her bag: and it was a tractor book.

That's when I found out that Sadie had a favorite tractor (it happens to be the tractor that I told her was my favorite). Nani explained that Sadie was repeatedly opening the book and pointing to a particular tractor called an excavator. But when Nani would say "excavator" Sadie would get upset and slam her little finger at the picture over and over again, like she does when we say "sun" when she points to the sun, when she wants us to say moon. I knew what the problem was as soon as Nani told me which tractor it was.

Sadie has two "truck" books by Roger Priddy. The "Giant Excavator" is in both of them. It's a hulking blue excavator that dwarfs the ones that we saw by the side of the freeway today. In one of the books it says "Giant Excavator" and in the other it only says "Excavator." When Nani started saying "Giant Excavator" Sadie stopped pointing over and over again and switched to closing the book and then reopening it to the page with the excavator and laughing and pointing again. It's amazing that it can be as hysterical the fiftieth time as it was the first.

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