Staycation

I recently decided to take my three kids, sans Jeremy, to visit a friend in St. Paul, with a stop to see another friend en route in Des Moines. It seemed like a great idea at the time. After all, what could be more fun and easy than driving seven hours in the world's tiniest car with a four-year-old, a three-year-old, and a six-week-old baby?

(Incidentally, I think there's something wrong with me. I think nothing of taking the kids on day-long outings but feel a bit nauseated at the thought of taking them to the grocery store. I should do more grocery shopping on my day trips.)

At any rate, I never had the opportunity to test my braverism, because all of my friends and their kids ended up sick. Curses!

But since I'd already told the kids about our trip up north, I figured I had to make it up to them somehow, so we planned a wee staycation instead.


We started out with a movie and a slumber party in the front room--in sleeping bags, no less! For the movie, we opted for the kids' first-ever viewing of The Lion King, fast forwarding through all the sad and scary parts. That made for about a 20 minute movie. (I haven't watched that movie in years, but seriously: Mufasa? What a downer!)

The next morning, I managed to wrastle them all into the car for a trip to Kansas City. We didn't even shove off until 10:00, and even though I was silently swearing while pumping up the tires on my double jogging stroller, I managed to hardly yell at anyone or throw any breakables. We'll call it a win.

I really dug what little I saw of KC. What a great city! I have always been something of a city girl at heart. I love the energy of cities and how much there is to do there. I love the parks and the fountains and the art and the distinct little neighborhoods and the restaurants and the museums and the architecture... Kansas City is a nice size, has tons to do, and feels truly thriving and immense compared to our little hamlet of 11,000 souls. I had fun being there.

I took the kids to Science City, which, you may have guessed, is a science museum. When we arrived, the museum was literally overrun with elementary school kids on field trips. Clara took this in stride, but Jonathan just kind of wandered around looking dazed. It only took one girl with a runny nose coming up and touching Cole's hand for me to decree that we needed to go out of the museum and have a snack, since Jonathan wasn't having any fun ("Yes I am," he weakly replied).

Luckily, since we'd gotten such a late start on the day (curse those jogging stroller wheels!), while we were munching we watched probably 300 children line up and leave. What a beautiful sight! I nearly cried. By the time we got back in, there was about an hour an a half left until closing, and we had our run of the place. Fantastic.






I'd planned to also take them to a place called Kaleidoscope, but the little snafu at the museum forced us to postpone that adventure for another time. But we were certainly hungry for dinner when we were done, so we headed over to the Crown Center, where I surprised them with dinner at Fritz's, which is a burger place that delivers food via model trains. Awesome. I knew about this because of my friend Emily's superb blog. My kids instantly recognized it, which I realized when Clara said, "You'd better take some pictures for our blog, too!" Consider it done, Sis.





Note: I tried to take a video of the train delivering our food, but it ended up being pretty wild as I lunged out to keep the box of food from dumping over as Jonathan and Clara eagerly reached to snatch it. Also, I think that at some point I will both take and post a normal picture of myself. Wouldn't that be something?