My Pilot

Pin It Our trip to the Air Mobility Command Museum

airplane museum - slide show

As far as his interests go, my son is your typical little boy. Giant machines on treads, dirty pick-up trucks with mud caked onto the tires, anything with the capacity to explode, and tools from the garage that look like they could probably take out a limb - he loves with a roaring passion. Yeah, coloring is nice and stickers can be kind of a distraction once in a while… But put this kid in front of a toy monster truck or a race car picture, or OH MY GOD, a motorcycle and you’d think that the Heavens had just opened and started snowing cotton candy.

But over the past year Spencer and I have noticed that our boy has an exceptional kind of enthusiasm for airplanes. Where we live, at almost any given time of the day just stepping out into the front yard is likely to give you the experience of being able to see the underside of a thunderous, low-flying military aircraft either in take-off or mid-landing. It isn’t unusual for us to have to stop in mid-stroll three times during our dog walk in order to watch a plane pass overhead from the horizon line of one street to the tree line of the next. It isn’t just the powerful, low to the ground ones, though… Even a plane the size of a silent speck in the sky floating unassumingly thousands and thousands of miles away will send him flailing about in a fit or finger-pointing fury. Each one is like the first he’s ever laid eyes on, special in it’s own astonishing way.

So Spencer decided a few months ago that we had to take him downstate to the "airplane museum," where he could stand on the wings of airplane, buckle himself into an ejector seat, climb into a real cockpit, and see the inner workings of a jet-engine. It was an hour’s drive away, but it was, I’m pretty sure, the best day of our son’s entire life.