Saturday Night

It's the second night of "girls' weekend in." It's been pretty good so far, although Alison had me ready to pull my hair out earlier.

We did end up going to the Center for the Arts. We didn't go to the "Pearls" exhibit --I decided to wait until Kevin can go with us because I think he'd like it-- but we did go through the Hall of Ideas. They have a Foucault (is that even close to the right spelling?) pendulum between the gift shop and the entrance to the hall, and Alison was absolutely fascinated with it. She kept wanting to go back and see the "clock."

It's hard to describe just exactly what kind of exhibits they have here, but they are mostly science related. We didn't spend a whole lot of time looking at them, since they really aren't geared for a toddler, but Alison had a good time walking around. There are a couple of not-exactly-soundproofed rooms that deal with music. One talked about different types of music and played short clips of songs. We stayed in there for a few minutes and Alison really like some of what we heard. She couldn't have cared less for the commentary. The other room had a couple of different intruments in it....violin, recorder, trombone, some pipes from a pipe organ, and a xylophone. The xylophone was by far Alison's favorite. What's not to love about something that plays music when you beat on it with a stick? The pipes from the organ scared her. Actually, I think it was just whatever was providing the air for the pipes, because the trombone and the recorder didn't bother her and they worked on the same principle.....push a button and air starts blowing, then cover the holes, move the slide or move the air source around to make music.

I also discovered that Alison really did learn how to climb down stairs last weekend. Her grandma taught her how to get down the porch steps so we weren't constantly having to catch her before she walked off into thin air and fell down the steps. I don't know why, but I wasn't sure she would equate the porch steps with other kinds of steps. This morning, without me even saying a word, she stopped about two feet away from the stairs, got down on her hands and knees, turned around, crawled back to the edge and went down.

Tonight, after nap and our regular walk (here's where I want to whine about it being nearly 30 degrees colder than it was 2 days ago) we hit the mall for dinner at Ruby Tuesday. It's the first time I've taken her to a real sit-down restaurant by myself. Everything went fine. Alison colored on her menu a little, ate some peaches without a fight, was satisfied with a few fries while I de-breaded her chicken nuggets, and had finished most of her dinner before I even had a chance to start mine.

About a year ago, while we were out to dinner with my mom and my brother, my brother decided to give Alison a fry with ketchup to see if she would like it. She did not. The face she made was priceless. Tonight she kept grabbing for the ketchup bottle, so I put a little splotch on her plate and dipped a fry in it for her. Instead of taking a bite of the fry, she sucked the ketchup off and stuck the fry back in it. She ate most of the ketchup with the same fry.

After dinner we went out and walked around the mall a little bit. I was brave and did not bring the stroller in with me. Although there are a lot of people who don't approve of them, and think it makes children look like dogs, I have a harness for Alison. She's getting to the point where she wants to be down exploring and she doesn't like to hold my hand or have her hand held for very long. We went to Hallmark because I needed to get a couple of cards. Not exactly the best idea I've ever had. There's a lot of stuff to get into at Hallmark. I was able to buy my cards and get us out of the store without little fingers breaking anything.

The second bad idea of th evening was to make our way down to the rides. Alison's been to the mall enough --it's where we walk when the weather's bad-- to know that there's a choo choo there somewhere. So we went to see the choo choo. She didn't want to get in it, or any of the other rides, but, once there, she didn't want to leave it either!! We'd get going in the right direction for five or ten feet and the next thing I knew she was headed back to the choo choo. We finally got far enough away that she kept going in the right direction. The only challenge then was to keep from going into every store we passed.

We finally made it out of the mall and back home only to discover that Kevin called less than 10 minutes before we got here and we missed him. He's having a good time, I guess, and he'll be home around noon tomorrow. I think we'll survive until then. :)