the wonderful world of boys

my first attempt at the blog collage

Recently, I have started to notice how wonderful it is to be the mom of a boy.  I mean, Ryan has always shown his boy side...when he finally started noticing the world about him, it was the things with wheels that got his attention most.  Anything with wheels, especially big things like trucks, cars, bikes, or even the school bus.  And "car" was one of his first words, along with "bike" and "dog".

But I feel like I have begun to appreciate how fun it is to be his mom.  Maybe it's because I can see how his mind is developing, or maybe it's because I never really had as much of an interest in those things, seeing as how I'm a girl and all.  Or maybe this feels the same to be the mom of a little girl.  But the other morning, as I was standing on our driveway with Ryan so we could watch and wave at the garbage trucks as they were driving up the street to pick up our trash, I realized this is a whole new realm for me.  And I smiled real big, and I loved it.  

And then the garbage man honked his horn (at 7:15 am, I am sure the neighbors loved it) and smiled and waved at us, which made Ry's morning.  

So, in other true boy activities of the week, Eddy found out there was a new-ish park at the Port of Oakland, and it was a beautiful day, so we said let's go.  Not quite sure what we were getting ourselves into.  But as we were almost there, Ryan made it very clear that this was the very place he's been looking for his entire short life...out the window he could see nothing but trucks!  Coming and going, carrying those big heavy crates that they stack onto the ships to go off to who knows where.  And there were trains coming and going, with the same huge crates on top.  Heaven!  So we got out to explore: we found an amazing view of the city that we've never seen before, we found some ducks and other shore birds, and lucky us...we got to watch the big Star Wars-esque cranes loading those crates onto a huge ship.  A very cool thing to experience.

(Side note: to the WP's, we looked for your crate of things being shipped over from London, but I don't think we were able to pick it out among the masses!)

Here are a few of the pics from the above collage:

running down to the pier

a quick stop to wave at his shadow

checking out downtown SF through the zoom lens

the best free entertainment around on a sunny weekday afternoon