Hudson loves trains.  Loves them!

And every morning, when he gets out bed, the first thing he does is stroll down to our family room to play with them.  Thanks to a long line of male cousins before him, he’s inherited a pretty impressive collection.  And thanks to an engineer of a Daddy…he’s also got a rather elaborate track system that – more often than not – takes up the better part of our main floor!!

For the past while though, he hasn’t been content to play with just a few of the trains at a time.  Instead, he keeps connecting about fifteen train cars and tries to get them to go around his track together without falling apart.  This can be a bit painful to watch because – for obvious reasons – unless the tracks are made into nothing more than a giant circle…it just doesn’t work very well.  Because these aren’t high tech trains!  These are wooden tracks with little wooden train cars, all connected with magnets that have been well loved for close to twelve years!  So one tight corner or a one decline too many and we’ve got some major derailment happening!

And Hudson knows this.  But nonetheless, every morning, he comes downstairs in his pajamas…and he tries again.  Because the past simply doesn’t faze him.  And I love that about him!  He is convinced that it can be done.  He is convinced that there is a way.  And he is convinced that – one of these days – he’s going to find it.

Some days he gets really frustrated.  Some days he gets discouraged.  Some days, he even throws the trains across the room {can you blame the kid?!?!}.  But every day, he wakes up hopeful that today might be the day!  And this is where I – as a parent – want to wrap him in my arms…explain to him the dynamics of toy trains versus real trains…and spare him the agony of going through it all over again.  But I just can’t.  Because I refuse to be the person who is going to tell him that something – anything – can’t be done.

We live in a world where we are ambushed with reminders of our limitations.  It can often be a world that tries to crush our self-esteem…break our spirits…deflate our dreams.  And all because other people tell us that it just can’t be done.  If we didn’t live in a world where people ignored those limitations…then we would never have gone into space…broken the three-minute mile…or begun carrying computers around in our back pocket.  We have amazing people in the world who break through the barriers of impossibility because of little kids who don’t care about the difference between trains made my engineers and trains made by a toy company.

So, every morning, when my little man comes down the stairs,  ready to try again –  his eyes still groggy and his hair all disheveled – I look over at him and smile.  Because one day – that little guy is going to change the world…