Memorial Day Fun

While Julia is a very light sleeper and tends to wake up multiple times throughout the night to use the potty, Madeleine tends to sleep like a rock once she's conked out.  Therefore, when she does wake up in the middle of the night, it's usually for some sort of emergency: she peed her bed, she vomited, her night-light burnt out, etc.  So when I was awoken in the middle of the night by Madeleine yelling for me, I immediately sprinted towards her room.

MADELEINE: Mama!  MAMA!  MAMAAAAA!
ME: (bolting out of bed and racing into her room)  What is it, honey?
MADELEINE: Mama?  Why can LITTLE KIDS not climb all the way to the TOPS of really, really TALL TREES?

That was so worth waking me up for.  I'm really glad she didn't try to hold onto that thought overnight. I can understand its urgency and why it needed answering at 4am.

At any rate, I was at least able to catch a few more hours of sleep afterwards, and we started our day off with a pancake breakfast to celebrate our extra weekend morning.  Julia, who is famous for eating an endless supply of pancakes, cut herself off after only two, stating that she was full.  Seeing as we ate breakfast at 10am, I figured it was probably for the best that she didn't stuff herself silly, given that I'd probably be feeding the kids lunch inside of the next two hours.  However, it seems Julia's metabolism works much faster than I anticipated.

JULIA: Mama?  Can we have snack at 10:10??

Yes, full at 10am, but hungry for snack ten minutes later.  Makes perfect sense, right?

The Rowes took a special trip down to the Museum of Science for the afternoon, heading into Boston shortly after lunch.  Despite the fact that a large part of our drive follows the same route as the drive to my church, Madeleine was utterly convinced that we had taken a much longer journey.  As we pulled into the parking garage at the Museum, Madeleine exclaimed from the backseat, in wonderment, "I can't BELIEVE we drived ALL THE WAY to Atlanta!!"

Well.  If I knew we could have just DRIVEN to Atlanta in a half hour's time, I wouldn't have spent all that money on plane tickets for our family vacation last month.

I tried to set her straight, but Madeleine remained adamant that we had, indeed, magically arrived in Atlanta.

ME: We're in Boston, honey.  We're at OUR museum, the one that's in Boston, not Atlanta.
MADELEINE: Well Mama.  I know that the really, really TALL building over there is the SAME building I saw in Atlanta.
ME: Well, it might look the same, but we're really only in Boston.
MADELEINE: Well Mama.  I know that's the SAME really, really tall building that was in ATLANTA.

Okay.  She convinced me with her irrefutable, concrete evidence.  We had, indeed, driven ALL THE WAY to Atlanta.

After we explored the museum, we Rowes decided to take a stroll along the Charles River to enjoy the beautiful weather:

We ended our walk at North Point Park, where the kids got to enjoy the playground area as well as the sprinklers (despite the fact that they were fully clothed):

After a fun afternoon in Atlanta Boston, we returned home to barbeque some salmon and veggies for Memorial Day dinner.  The girls showed their deep appreciation for Ethan's hard work at the grill as we sat down to dinner:

JULIA: (gesturing towards the asparagus) Well, Dad.  You know what thing I don't want.

MADELEINE: (examining the food on her plate, which I neither cooked nor served her) Mama.  I'm eating BLACK things.  Don't you KNOW I don't like BLACK THINGS in my food??

Regardless, both girls managed overcome their adversity and clean their plates, therefore earning their rights to a very un-Memeorial-Day-like dessert of pumpkin cookies.

Now, so long as Madeleine can keep her curiosity about little kids climbing very tall trees during the night, I am looking forward to a solid night's sleep for all of us Rowes!