Excavator Song

By a show of hands, how many of you know the difference between an excavator and a backhoe?

It's hard to see through this thing, but if my suspicions are correct, only my brother has his hand up. That means that Finn is smarter than the rest of you.

For the last couple of months, Archer had been pushing me to check out YouTube for quality toddler entertainment. He was specifically pushing me to watch some of the digger movies, given our sons' shared obsession. I kept forgetting about them until I took Finn to the zoo with him and Cyrus and Cyrus was able to name every digger we passed. This was only relatively surprising, given that both Finn & Cyrus found the diggers way more interesting than the gigantic grizzly bear swimming roughly 6 inches from their noses.

However, I was suitably impressed that he knew what a skid steer loader was, so I rushed home and fired up the laptop to see if Finn would be interested. Big mistake.

Finn has always been a fan of diggers, but discovering these movies has blown his obsession wide open. It is now not uncommon for his first words of the day to be, "Watch excabator [sic] song." In fact, it go so bad on our trip back east that my mother had to tell him that the excavators were still sleeping just to quiet him down.

The pic above is Finn watching the Excavator Song on the iPhone with Mema. His eyes tell the whole story.

Of course, it turns out the Excavator Song was just a gateway video. He's since moved onto harder fare: the garbage trucks of Naples, FL. I don't know what's up in Naples, but they clearly have the most diverse collection of garbage trucks in the free world. The increased understanding of waste management vehicles resulting from hours left unattended in front of YouTube even resulted in Finn correcting me the other day when I tried to name the garbage truck we were watching.

"That's not a front-loader, Daddy."

Oh yeah? Well that blue tractor isn't a "John Deere" like you said it was!

In your face, Finny!