A Day with Emily

Hubby and I really wanted to go apple picking today and thought it would be fun to bring Emily, who is almost 14 months now. Unfortunately, Hurricane Whoever showed up and dumped tons of rain on New England this weekend, effectively ending any outside activities for the whole weekend. We still wanted to take Emily out for the day, so we searched around online and found a place called "One Stop Fun". It's an indoor playground and advertised a toddler area. The toddler area turned out to be a small ball pit and a slide, but it was enough to keep Emily's attention for an hour.

When we first go there she was fine with all the noise and the kids running around. I was relieved because she'd never been to a place like this before and I wasn't sure if she'd like it. She did stand there for about ten minutes and just watch in wonder as kids jumped around her.

Eventually she walked close to the ball pit so I put her in it. She sat up to her chest in balls for awhile, just trying to figure out what to do.She figured out that she could make the balls move by kicking her feet, and also by pushing them around with her hands like she does with water in her bathtub.

Then she found the stairs leading up to the slide.She thought it was pretty cool that Pepere was at the bottom of the slide. She went down once or twice but it was really too big for her and she had much more fun going back down the stairs.Finally she figured out how to "swim" through the balls.

She had a great time.

From there we went to Kimball's Ice Cream Stand in Westford which is right down the street. Pepere wants to be known to his grandchildren as the "Ice Cream King" so we got some and sat outside since it had stopped raining. Emily couldn't decide if she wanted to eat ice cream or her flower. She did have a few bites of ice cream:

But really just wanted to get down and see the goats. She went home happy and dirty, which follows my motto - "At the end of the day, a dirty kid is a happy kid".