365 Days of my Life: Local Attractions Always Equal FUN.

I don't want to jinx us, but I think that spring has FINALLY sprung. It was quite pleasant yesterday so I decided to take the boys to their favorite playground: Rockwell Park. It is located in Bristol, CT and has quite a variety of activities for families to enjoy. There are soccer fields, a pond with a walkway going through it, a gravel track going around the perimeter, a community theater, a shallow pool, a splash pad, volleyball courts, a skate park, little league fields, and of course, 3 huge playgrounds. My boys never left the playgrounds yesterday. Usually they want to go walking along the river, or look in the pond for any sign of life. However, with the snow finally melted and the instinctual need they had to be monkeys yesterday, they never left the playgrounds. I enjoyed seeing just how much they have grown compared to December, which was the last time we were there. Pierce can now reach the low bar to swing and try to do flips over (no wonder I am turning gray), is quite adept at climbing the rope structure, attempted to jump off the swing after watching Mommy do it (Oops!), and he was so nurturing to Carter providing help whenever he needed it. Pierce also decided to give me more gray hairs by climbing the dreaded white slide over and over and over. It is an old, metal, spiral slide that is EASILY about 15 feet high with very steep stairs.

Carter had enough of watching Pierce do everything last year, and decided to climb and follow Pierce everywhere. This included his rather fast attempt at climbing the white slide. He made it 3 steps before I took him off. No way. I am not ready for that. However, he has overcome one of his biggest fears: slides. The child would not be caught near a slide last year. In fact, he never wanted to leave the swings. This year he not only climbed to the top of the slide, but he would squeal with delight all the way down, and climb right back up to do it again. He did this for about an hour, before I had to pull him off kicking and screaming to bring Pierce to the facilities. As soon as we were done, he went right back to the slide where he made a friend, and they went down together. I am so impressed with how fast the boys have grown, and I know it is not going to slow down anytime soon. In fact, I am sure it is going to speed up as we all get older and busier. Now I understand why it is so hard to keep a modern family intact as a family and cram all of the family activities in as children grow. There are just so many things to do.

The past few mornings have been rough. Carter certainly has been crankier than normal, and Pierce has certainly been more stubborn than normal. This has left us all cranky and unhappy about meltdowns, toys going into toy jail, and early nap times (can we say full moon?). However, today wasn't as bad. We did super puffy painting this morning to start the day. All winter, I has seen snowman paint being created on Pinterest everywhere I looked. It looked pretty awesome, but instead of making snowmen, I decided to jut have the boys use it to paint something. I mixed together shaving cream and glue, and had Pierce squeeze in whatever food coloring he wanted (today he wanted brown, so he had to figure out what to mix to make brown). This stuff is awesome! I don't know if it is so puffy because I used multi-purpose glue instead of school glue, or if maybe the other pictures people took didn't do it justice. All I know is we all had a blast painting with brushes, craft sticks, and then our fingers. This was certainly not a clean project, and ended with a nice quick bath to clean it all off, and the table cloth going in the washing machine with our clothes.

From there we attended story time at the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield, with Lisa Shaia as the teacher. She is one of the best children's librarians I know, and has a heart of gold. She gets to know every single attendee and always takes a genuine interest in the children and what they think and feel. After our story time and craft, we were going to go on a long walk, but never made it past the front of the library with the last piles of snow and pine cones. I was the crazy mom getting into a snowball fight with my children in 50 degree temperatures while hunting for pine cones. Then, since it was such a beautiful day, we drove the 5 minutes or so down the street to the Arethusa Farm Dairy store in Bantam.

The boys absolutely loved their Maple Walnut ice cream. It was honestly amazing. I enjoyed the amazing workers there that had all the patience in the world while the boys decided what they were going to enjoy. And, I also enjoyed the coconut ice cream with dark chocolate chunks. :) While the prices may seem high, it is actually comparable when you realize that it is a local dairy farm, that makes all of their stuff on premises, and they take extremely good care of their cows. I will be going back there again in a month or so, and will recommend this place to everyone.

So while we may not have traveled all over the state the last few days, we had just as much fun staying local and visiting awesome local spots. I cannot wait for summer, but in the meantime will enjoy as much outdoor activity as we possibly can. I hope everyone else enjoys these spring temperatures. And lets keep our fingers crossed that they are here to stay!

Kelly