Pardon me, but I do think Thomas the Tank Engine has got to be the most boring children’s character/series ever invented. Not even counting the fact that there are a slew of trains with faces in the stories and who the heck can tell the difference between them all? I got a book or two for Joseph a while back, but almost fell asleep myself reading them, and he’s never really gotten into the genre anyway, being brain-deep in Legos for the past year or so.

But Michael the Baby…..that’s another story.

Oh, how he loves "Thom-as!" It’s hardly ever on at a time when television is allowed, but when it is, he is rapt.

(He is also rapt in front of football, taking the stance of an offensive lineman waiting for the snap. And today when The McLaughlin Report was on, in the Time Before Football, around noon, he stood with his face right in front of Pat Buchanan’s and roared. Repeatedly. I don’t know if that was approval or disapproval, though. Only time will tell. I suppose. Our experience of Pat Buchanan is always framed by the time, a year or so ago, when I did the Scarborough show with Buchanan and someone else, and Mr. Buchanan somehow formed the opinion in the midst of it that I was a proponent of The Da Vinci Code. Not that I said anything much, mind you. Perhaps Michael roars at him for that reason – across time and space trying to say, "Let my mommy talk!")

But he does adore Thomas. I checked out a board book for him from the library last week, and poor Michael the Daddy read it at least 30 times in those 6 days, I suspect. Yesterday was our weekly (now that it’s not summer any longer – in the summer we go 2 or 3 times a week.) library trip, and we came home with 3 more. Michael the Baby was excited, Michael the Daddy – not so much.

Why do choo-choos entrance little children so? Why does the creepy choo-choo with the BIG FACE entrance the little child so? I have no idea. But I still say, at the risk of causing great offense. When I read that the author of the Thomas stories was an Anglican vicar, all I could think was…ah. I mean, God bless Anglican vicars writing stories for their children, but suddenly…it all made a vastly, deeply sincere Barcester Towers type of sense.

Oh, and feel free to vent about the books that are in high demand in your house – but you could send into the fire – yesterday. Or flame me for hating Thomas. Which, you know, will probably happen.