Fire Station Fun!!!

(Braden the Fireman - Fireman in Training! Just look at him driving that truck! Haha!)

This is a little late in coming, but I had to wait for pictures from a friend since I completely forgot to bring my camera! I was so glad someone remembered to bring one since this is probably on Braden's list of Top 10 highlights of his short little life thus far!

(Braden climbing into the truck to drive and turn all the flashing lights on with this great fireman's help!)

On Veteran's day, all our friends' older kids were out of school and I had heard that there was a really cool, big Fire Station that did awesome tours for kids for free. So I set it all up and WOW it was one of the best play-dates ever!!!

It was especially fun because, out of all the med student's kids, all but two are boys. So, needless to say, the boys were EATING THE WHOLE THING UP!

(This is Braden up in the cherry picker part of the truck. He LOVED every minute of it!)

I can't say enough good things about these Firemen. They just went above and beyond in my opinion to make sure that every kid there had an awesome experience. They had stickers, coloring books and suckers to real the kids all in, and then they did crazy things with them like let them "drive" the trucks and turn on the lights, use their walkee-talkees, try to hold their huge tools, put on their gear, look into their heat-sensitive cameras in the dark to see each other, and - Braden's favorite part -

climb up the ladder on top of the fire truck and walk across to the cherry picker!

All the bigger boys were jumping at the chance to do that. I knew Braden would be a bit small to go up there, so I took him over to the ladder thinking he could climb up a few rungs and then he would get down.

I was so wrong. The fireman helping the kids up saw that Braden would be too little to go up by himself, so he simply said, "Oh come here little guy, I'll take you up there." And he picked little Brado up with a big smile on his face and climbed up with him.

Braden LOVES to be up on top of things, LOVES firetrucks, and LOVES cherry pickers even more. (We have had a lot of cherry pickers randomly around our neighborhood cutting down limbs of really high trees and it is fascinating to him. I don't know how many kids under the age of two know the word "cherry-picker", but he has been obsessed with them for months now and always talks about them and pretends he is up high in the cherry picker.)

So with that kind of background I can' tell you how fun it was to see that sweet fireman make one of Braden's big dreams come true!!!

After they all came back down Braden just kept pointing to that truck and saying,

"Up ladder. Cherry picker. Up ladder again?"