Out and About...

Grace and Hattie and I have been on our own for the last couple of days. David has been working morning til night and went almost 48 hours without even seeing the kids. I know lots of women who live like that with their kids regularly because of their husbands jobs. I am very grateful that it only happens rarely with David. We have had some fun on our own though.

On Thursday, our "mom's group" held their monthly field trip. This time, we visited "The Butterfly Place." It was a bit of a drive - definitely out of my 15 minute comfort range, but we did find it and we did leave ourselves enough room to arrive on time. If you have ever been to the Hogle Zoo butterfly tent/atrium they have in the summer, this was very similar (except much more expensive than Hogle Zoo's $1 admission charge for the tent!) Both girls, well all of us, were delighted with the vast number and variety of butterflies in the atrium. There were these huge bird sized ones that had blue on the insides of their wings, but brown camoflauge on the outside. These swooped through the atrium, buzzing past the kids heads, and scared and excited them at the same time. Eventually, they got pretty brave and started landing on us too. Grace was grateful that one didn't land on her, but Hattie and I were excited to have a landing. You had to be careful though, because if you were caught with your hand or arm out encouraging a landing, you were thrown out of the atrium. It was hard to keep yourself from doing it.

Not only were the butterflies beautiful, but so were the plants and flowers in the atrium. Butterflies feed on very pretty things and I have half a notion to put some butterfly attracting plants in my yard this year. Lots of people and places around here do that and it seems to work pretty well.

Yesterday, (a Saturday) David again worked a long day. He hadn't planned on being there that long, or I would have made other arrangements for Harriet and Grace while I did my riding lessons. However, his work just got extended one more hour and one more hour until the kids ended up spending the whole day with me at the barn. We got a foot of snow the night before, so Grace spent most of the time digging through the snow in the arena and making snow castles with her beach gear. She did get to ride Tinky too in the snow and that made the afternoon much more fun. Hattie, bless her soul, hung from her carrier on the front of me for about 4 hours. I got this very cool new carrier a couple of months ago. I absolutely love it! It saved me yesterday for sure. I gave her a couple of short breaks, but she was basically there the whole time. She took a couple of naps that way and I fed her little snacks as we went. She was amazingly good - they both were. I was very grateful for that.

Here is a photo of the barn in the snow. Rita, my friend and boss, is riding her horse Tucker in the picture...We all (David included) arrived home after 5pm exhausted, cold, and a bit disgruntled for various reasons, so we quickly freshened up and went out to dinner. Grace chose "The Quarterdeck" restaraunt - a local favorite seafood place of ours. The kids love going out to eat and making friends with others at the restaraunt. Both of our kids are crowd charmers of sorts and like to be friendly to people. For dinner, Grace ordered her favorites: a cup of clam chowder, and a piece of "pink fish" - salmon. They don't even have salmon on the kids menu, but since neither of us was ordering salmon, we asked the server if they could bring Grace a small piece that didn't cost $18. They obliged and she was thrilled. (What 4 year old would pick a seafood restaurant for dinner and order clam choweder and salmon?) She ate a little too much clam chowder and didn't have room to finish her salmon, but we did bring it home. She is way too funny!