Snapshots: A Day Out

We spent all day Friday away from the house, which is very unusual for us. Our new basketball player had a tournament about an hour away. His first game was at 9 a.m. The next wasn't until 6 p.m. It's too far to go home, but we really didn't want to just sit around the gym for eight hours.

So we went on an adventure.

We drove to the nearest small city, which was about half an hour away. It wasn't even lunchtime yet, so we stopped at a park on our way in to let the younger children who had been sitting a lot already run around. It wasn't the best park ever, but it did have a nice tree in it.

Autumnal.

There was also a swinging bench thing, similar to a porch swing, that could fit everyone on it. We swung on that for awhile.

The view from the swing.

After that, by request, we went to Sonic for lunch, where everyone ate far too much and declared themselves uncomfortably full.

We still had a few hours to kill after lunch. I half-heartedly considered historical museums and so on, before remembering, hey! There's a library in this place! So of course, that is where we went.

It had been, um, years since my children had been in a library. Actually, it's been years since I've been in a library. We were all very excited. This is a pretty small library, but it still had lots of books, some fish in a tank, a place to draw with chalk, even an old typewriter where I showed my age by demonstrating to my children how it worked.

Books!

Perhaps most exciting of all, they had several shelves of free books for the taking. So of course we took some. 

After that we went to the grocery store for the Thanksgiving stock-up, and then back to the basketball tournament for several more hours. We didn't get home until 8 p.m.

The children were exhausted after our very long day and slept in quite late the next morning. I have recently started running again--although running is a generous word for the pace I keep--and I prefer to go in the morning. I just run a repeated loop around the interior of our ghost village, so I'm always within yelling distance of our house.

I left the sleeping children this note:

Four out of four children are now capable of reading this, which is neat.

I left it on the closed toilet lid, figuring that's the one place everyone goes in the morning. One child was awake when I got back, but he had apparently not seen my note. So much for that.

There you have it! My life, shapshotted.