The time has come to bid a fond, final farewell to the beloved, fantastical, fucked-up Isle of Sodor. 

Our neighbors threw a party this past weekend and I met a mom who lives down the street. A mom with a little boy; a little boy who was running around with trains in both hands and determined to make every other non-train item he encountered (toy cars, carrot sticks, a dog) into choo-choos.

She was very pregnant. I sensed weakness.

"Sooooooooooo have you guys bought any Thomas trains for him yet?"

BAM. DONE. All our trains are belong to you, now. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY TRAINS. 

Despite being SO SURE that investing in a bajillion miles of train track was a worthwhile plan because "every kid we have will play with them!", it didn't really work out. Ezra was only mildly interested in them, while Ike could not care less about them. He only wants to play with and watch what his big brothers are currently into, and skipped right over Thomas completely. And so our collection has been sitting in a heap while other toys and clutter piles up around them on the train table, taking up a large chunk of valuable real estate.

My neighbor already has a train table. (Thanks to another neighbor who moved and didn't want to drag it with him, LO DO YOU SENSE A THEME, FUTURE TRAIN-AND-TRAIN-TABLE PURCHASERS OF THE WORLD?) So I needed to do something else with the train table. 

And so, dear readers, gentrification came to the Isle of Sodor. A multinational Danish company arrived and resurfaced the whole thing with their patented interlocking brick system. 

There are literally four hojillion helpful and beautifully photographed tutorials on how to turn a train table into a Lego table on the Internet. LITERALLY. This post is not one of them. I did this last night in about 30 minutes, after two glasses of wine and in terrible lighting. It was easy, though today I need to dig out the extra glue squooshes from inbetween the Lego plates with a razor blade, since I got increasingly glue-happy as the project went on. 

The great train decluttering is just one small part of a larger attempt to Take Back The Basement, since it's woefully underused as a playroom. The kids don't like playing down there without us; we don't like it because it's always a giant mess of a Kid Cave. So we're converting it into a proper family room/guest room. Or really just some kind of room we (and kids/friends) will actually enjoy being in together. A mostly grown-up space, with drastically pared down toys, albeit with a Lego-topped coffee table. I figure it'll give us all something to do when there's nothing good on TV. 

I'll have more pictures of the makeover soon, but first I need to re-ice my foot because I decided to weight the still-drying plated down with our barbell set and of course dropped one of them on my damn self. Because nothing I do is complete without injuring myself. Da. Fuq. 

Farewell, Drunk Sir Topham Hat! Farewell, Thomas and Percy and Duncan and Thomas' Evil Twin! Farewell to the motherfucking monorail and Ye Old Genetics Plant and our dozen or so Bridges To Nowhere! 

(But technically only a "see ya later" to the dead guy floating in the lake. I flipped the top boards over before gluing anything, so it's entirely possible that one day I will get bored/drunk enough to bring back...whatever...that...weird thing was. I'm still not 100% sure either.)