Hanna

I woke to rain pounding outside. As I hate getting wet, I thought today would be a good day to introduce Mr. Independent to the joys of lounging around watching movies. An active almost 18 month old unfortunately has different ideas.

He wanted to go for a ride in his stroller. I'd brought it inside so it wouldn't blow off the porch in case of heavy winds, so he spend much of the morning climbing up the stroller then boldly teetering on parts that in no way could support a 25 lb child. Then he'd climb into the stroller's seat, look at me commandingly, and say "GO!"

I logged over 200 steps on the pedometer pushing him around the living room.

We built towers out of throw pillows, and he knocked them down. Then he decided to start screaming at me. Nothing I suggested would satisfy him, so eventually I decided that we were going to try to watch a movie anyway. I'm pretty against toddlers watching TV, but we'd already been on our own, cooped up in the house for 45 minutes, and I was getting desperate. I popped the DVD in and he shrieked and whined and screamed some more. I offered to let him cuddle on the couch with me. He wouldn't have any of it, until Sebastian the crab made an appearance. Mr. Independent ran up to the TV, pointed at Sebastian and shrieked, this time out of pleasure.
Sebastian bought us about ten minutes. Mr. Independent started screeching and demanding food. I made him a turkey sandwich, which he proceeded to throw on the floor. At that point, I decided it was naptime-for both of us. I tossed Mr. Independent in his crib, waited a few minutes to make sure he'd fallen asleep, and microwaved some lunch. By 12:15 I was in a leftover chicken taco induced coma, which lasted until 2.
When more screeching woke me at 2, the rain had stopped, but the wind had picked up. Mr. Independent and I were pretty tired of being in the house, as we are both people who enjoy leaving the house and Doing Stuff. So we left, but not before he shrieked at me again. We spent the afternoon at the children's museum, which was infested with grandparents who were supposed to be spending the weekend at the racetrack watching a NASCAR event that got rained out.















We stayed until nearly closing time. We ended up contributing about 75% of the toys that went into the basket marked "Toys that have been in a child's mouth." Awesome.

By the time we left the museum the wind had died down, and the sun was tentatively shining. We drove to a small shopping district and wandered in and out of stores for an hour, including one of the coolest toystores I've ever been in, and the store where I bought the shirt I wore on my first date with Husband. We also picked up some treats for my nieces at a very cool candy store we recently discovered.

We finished our day with a jaunt to PetSmart. Mr. Independent looked at the birds and said "bur!" over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Then we checked out the cats that were up for adoption, and Mr. Independent insisted that they were all actually dogs.

Mr. Independent and I then waited for Husband to get off of work so we could go eat dinner.



He passed the time sitting on a bench, basking in the attention of passersby.