3.27.2008

 

Busy Busy

We had a great visit with my mom, her husband, and my grandparents earlier this week. We celebrated Kent's first Easter, which included a potluck brunch at church and a potluck lunch at a friend's house after church (Louisiana people really know their potlucks!), finding an egg (with parental assistance) during the church egg hunt, and dyeing eggs on Sunday afternoon.

Okay, so I'm the one who dyed the eggs. I stuck to a simple palette of yellow, green, blue, and purple this year, and I got Jack to help with Kent's egg. I dipped it in yellow first, then he drew on with a wax crayon (you can see where he wrote "Kent" sort of diagonally) before I dipped it in green, making a nice joint project to give as a gift to our Nice Joint Project. Too bad he's not eating eggs yet. We decided to skip the Easter basket thing, as we had skipped the stocking thing at Christmas, since he's too young to enjoy it and we'd just have been doing it for ourselves. Yes, we could have done it anyway, but I feel better right now when I'm saving money. Incidentally, I just prepped for Easters of the Future in Target's clearance section, getting a royal blue Easter basket (bamboo) with pink and yellow stripes, orange paper Easter grass (yay, no plastic grass!), and a big bag of fillable plastic eggs, all for less than $1.50.

Once my grandparents got here, we had strawberry day, and my grandmother helped me clean and chop/freeze the Annual Flat of Strawberries. I made some ice cream that afternoon, which we enjoyed after our yummy fajita dinner. We also took a day trip to Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, though Kent and I left the tour early because sitting in the sling while the tour guide spun yarns about antebellum society functions wasn't his idea of a good time. He kept trying to reach out and grab the paintings, which I'm pretty sure the tour guides frown upon. We also took some nice walks around our neighborhood, since it's the perfect time of year for that, and had some fun meals out at restaurants that we all enjoyed.

Everyone left yesterday, and now it's onto preparing for our trip to Atlanta for Jack's seminar. We're leaving Sunday (eek) and getting back next Monday, so it'll be 8 days in a hotel, with Jack doing math in a conference room all day while Kent and I visit people and explore Atlanta. I'm hoping to hit IKEA and the Imagine It! children's museum, among other places, and Jack's parents might even drive down for a meet-in-the-middle grandson fix. Owing to the small nature of our trunk and the large nature of our stroller, I just realized in the shower today that what we need to invest in is a good-quality umbrella stroller that will fold up nice and compact and that I can carry with one hand when, say, getting on and off the MARTA train, or going through airport security when we fly this summer. Chicco makes some umbrella strollers that would suit us well, I think, and I've been really happy with our travel system made by them. I also love the MacLaren Volo, which we just tried out at Target, but I haven't decided which direction I'd want to go in terms of color. The grey mesh one at Target is probably a bit more breathable, but they make it in a heavier mesh/canvas type fabric which is, well, pretty, and it comes in great colors (you have to see the Coffee Stripe!). Attractiveness has to enter the picture somewhere. And I can get a BRU coupon to get one of the pretty color ones. They do have a much higher weight limit (55 lbs instead of Chicco's 37), although Kent isn't likely to outgrow the Chicco weight limit by the time he's ready to be done with a stroller. We'll see. I think I'll try to do a bit more online research to augment my former-baby-gear-employee knowledge, and hopefully the three of us can hit BRU on Saturday so that we'll have the stroller for our trip. Sorry for thinking outloud (so to speak) here, but I'm mentally salivating already as I think about how much easier a lightweight stroller would be for travel.

Did I mention earlier that I'll be glad when Kent is well again? He's having another rough day, despite the decrease in snottage. He's kind of a difficult patient at this age, not able to be, well, patient. It's a learning experience all around, to be sure.

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Comments:

I keep hearing about how great the new aquarium in Atlanta is. One day we hope to venture up there ourselves!
 
Your post about the umbrella stroller made me laugh. When Tucker and I went to Babies R Us a few weeks back for the first time, we laughed about how all we remember from our childhood was the umbrella stroller, and the new travel systems weren’t around at all. Keep on trying all that baby gear out, I am sure we will be giving you a call for advice. I am ½ way through the “Consumer Reports Baby Gear Book” and completely overwhelmed! Enjoy my home town while you are there!
 
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