Kermit is King: #15 - A Perfect Saturday

Today, I slept until I woke up. The day was already off (or not off) to a good start. The kids woke up, but they left me alone while I blogged a couple days of activities and read the news. At 7:30, I got out and we had a short discussion.

We had had plans with friends today, but they have a sick child, so the day was free. We had a list of things to accomplish: clean the rooms, do laundry, go to a park, watch a movie, and buy Sunday shoes for Aria.

I told Christian I was skeptical that the kids could get the rooms cleaned while I did laundry down in the laundry room. The older kids took that as a challenge to prove me wrong. So Christian reported that the younger kids took themselves out of the project, and that he "worked hard, but Aria is generally faster."

When I took the laundry back to the rooms, I was surprised. I had told the kids I wanted the rooms to look so clean that the maids wouldn't have to do anything. I got almost what I asked for. 2 loads of dishes had been done, the garbage was in bags ready to dump, and things were put away. I was impressed enough with how clean it was that I decided to not have housekeeping come after all.

We ate lunch, mostly leftover pizza from last night, and then we headed out. We had decided in the mean time to go to Bowdoin park, known for its turtles, instead of Fahnestock, which has a really cool swimming beach but is the other direction. I expected something far less grand than what I found there. The park is built on a hill, and at the bottom of the hill there is a pond with reeds and a wooden walkway built over the pond. We headed down there immediately. And were immediately greeted with frog sightings on the bank, follwed by snapping turtle sightings in the water.

The park has tons of rooms to run, pavillions and rooms to rent, good bathrooms, a nice playground, shade trees with picnic tables and benches, and beautiful views.

By 3, everybody was hot. So we went to 7-11 and got large Slurpees all around. Then to the movie theater, where we were going to see Mysterious Island. But the web site had given us wrong showtimes, so we had to ditch that. Instead, we went shoe shopping. Aria needed her Sunday shoes, and 3 of the kids needed sandals as well. So we found some good quality stuff for cheap at Kohl's.

We made another stop at Cracker Barrel's store for fun, and then came home. I put together some Voila! for dinner, and we watched Rango on Netflix. Really well done - very fun movie. Then we had dessert, and went to bed.

Some pics from today: