Yesterday, Andy, Doods, and I took a trip up to Viera to check out Hobby Lobby. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Viera is where I used to work about 20 miles up I-95 from our place. We were almost home when our car just died. Thankfully, it didn't happen on the interstate but at the light to turn off the interstate exit ramp. We were coming to a stop and the car just quit. Andy and I looked at each other and I said, "Did the car just stall?" It most certainly had and we were stuck. Andy tried to start it and then pushed it off the road and tried some more. No luck! It would turn over but nothing beyond that. He did some investigating and found that there was a broken wire in some part between the spark plugs and the distributor cap (I think, I'm so non car savvy that it's ridiculous). Anyway, he thought he could fix it easily and called for a friend to come take him to the auto parts store down the road. Since we didn't think it would be a great idea to drive around with me and the baby in the backseat of his friend's Mustang, Doods and I walked to McDonald's to get something to drink and cool off. She'd been sleeping in her carseat the whole time and it was very hot out so we were worried about her being overheated. So, we went to Mickey D's and got some sweet tea and a hot fudge sundae and went out to the play area to eat, drink, and cool off. Doods wanted nothing to do with the hot fudge sundae but drank what seemed like a gallon of sweet tea. As she sat watching the kids running around, she got very antsy to go play.
Her first stop was a small area off to the side of the much larger climbing structure. It had a little piano like toy, an alligator to sit on, and a huge Happy Meal box to play inside with gears to turn. Really, it was quite a random little area but it made me happy because she couldn't get anywhere where I would have to climb up after her and the bigger kids were mostly ignoring it. The big kids weren't really looking out for little munchkins as they chased each other and one of them yelled "Oh, crap!" repeatedly. Not something I wanted Doodle getting into the middle of at all. So, she played in there for a while. One little boy about her height did come in (I think he was probably closer to three years old though because his speech was much clearer than Doodle's but they were the same height because my child is gargantuan) and Doodle had to copy everything he did. When he leaned against the wall, she leaned against it right beside him. When he went into the big ole Happy Meal, she was poking her head in to join him. It was cute really and demonstrated that she is on target developmentally because most kids her age still participate in parallel play (doing the same thing beside but not with other kids) as opposed to actually playing together.
Then she found the tunnel. Oh, she loved the tunnel and I loved it because it was still separate from the rest of the play place. She would go in one end and as it curved so she couldn't see me from the end she entered, she'd start yelling for me so that I would poke my head into the other end. She must have run through that thing about six time straight. And she would have kept going if I hadn't seen Andy and his friend walking back from our car to his friend's car at the gas station next door. Bad sign because that meant they weren't driving our car which meant that it still wouldn't start. We ended up having it towed and found out the timing belt had broken. It will take about eleven hundred dollars to fix that and replace the water pump since they will already be in there and fix a broken motor mount and blah blah blah. We're very lucky that it didn't break on the interstate and we're hoping that since we were at a stop it didn't ruin any other engine components.
Here are a couple pictures and some video footage of our trip to hell, er, McDonald's Playplace.
This is the piano thingy. She had fun banging on the keys but I think she enjoyed it even more when and older boy can and played. She was dancing up a storm to his tuneless banging. Then she tried to play with him and he didn't like it very much. But really, he was at least 10 and way to old so I kind of let her run him off. Oops!
Doodle loves McDonald's sweet tea. She really is a true Southern girl at heart when it comes to that. Of course, she loves anything that comes in a cup this big. You should see her with a Route 44 cup from Sonic. It's true love!
Here she is climbing through her tunnel. Well, until some girl comes and tries to climb in with her and I have to rescue my child. The video cuts off kind of abruptly but the girl that climbed in with her got out on her own without me really having to do anything. I think once she saw that I wasn't going to make Doods stop having fun she decided to go back to the big climbing part.
This is a bonus video because I uploaded the wrong one to YouTube the first time. How I got them confused, I'm not sure. This is a video from some time last fall of our dogs, Charlotte (the bigger black and white mutt) and Brenna (the smaller all black Dachshund/Chihuahua mix), wearing their snow boots. They were for when we went to Pennsylvania last winter. We never used them but it was hilarious watching Brenna try to walk while wearing them.
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