Running with Sam

I forgot to include the story of my early morning run with my nephew, Sam, in my previous post, "Loads of Company! Part 1." As I had mentioned early in that post, during an evening walk Sam had said that he would rather be running. So I had told him that we would go running while he was visiting. I forget which morning we made plans for, but I had told him we'd go at 6:30am. That morning, when 6:15 rolled around, I highly contemplated not getting up. I figured Sam probably wouldn't be up, and would balk at getting up to go running. But, I had promised and I had to at least see if he still wanted to go. Much to my surprise, when I came out to the living room, Sam was awake and sitting on the stool waiting. Barefoot. I asked him if he had his shoes for running and he said he couldn't find them. We looked all over and couldn't find his shoes. I asked if they were under the cot he was sleeping on, or in the bathroom he'd used the night before. He said "no," but went to double check. That woke up Mom and Gail who came to join in the search for his shoes. Someone asked the question of, "Are they in Little Pumpkin's room?" I couldn't see why they'd be in her room, and we continued searching all over the house. Sneaky Sam, unbeknownst to the rest of us, went into Pumpkin's room and returned with his shoes!!! I guess she had been trying to walk in them the night before and, to her credit, had "put them away." Sam found his shoes on her shoe shelf! It was quite funny though we got a bit of a late start on our run.

We took Gunther with us, and I was fully expecting Sam to start with a full-on run that I wouldn't be able to keep up with. So, I told him I

usually run kind of slow, and that it's been a while since I ran. As it turned out, he wasn't quite awake enough to run, he said, and was running (and sometimes walking) slower than I. Our goal was to run to the train tracks and watch the trains. We ended up breaking up our run with some walking, and made it to the train tracks. There were no trains going, so we waited a bit. Still no trains. So we decided to go a little further and walk around the next block. As we were coming around the last corner of the block, we heard a train coming. So we ran back to the tracks only to see the last car go past. (It was a short train.) We hung around the tracks some more, hoping another train would come by. One of the things Sam had really wanted to see on his trip to Kansas was trains.

After we had waited a while, Sam said he was getting hungry, and we decided to start walking back. Soon after we started walking, we heard a train whistle. We ran back to the tracks and Sam could see the train light in the distance. We waited and waited and eventually the train came.

Sam finally got to see his train!

After watching the train go past, we ran and walked our way back home for breakfast to the sound of other trains going by in the distance (actually not that far away - we just couldn't see them). And that is my story of running with Sam. It was kind of nice having a running buddy - you can come running with me any time, Sam!