We left the house!!

We had a really great impromptu family day yesterday. Best of all, it was outside of my house. After 10 days of sickness, it felt so good to get out.

S & H usually have ringette on Saturday mornings, and M is usually the one to take them. I hang out at home with P, who in the past has been a bit of a holy terror at the rink. When we tried to take him last year so I could see the kids play, he was running up and down the arena seats, sprinting down the aisles, making a mad dash for the changerooms and attempting to lick the water off the floors.

It was not an enjoyable experience.

We ended up bringing him a few weeks ago to try it again, and it was much better. He stayed fairly local and played with the toys he brought instead of running up and down the stairs. It was nice to see the kids play and not worry that P was going to break his head open on the arena floor.

Lately he has been a mess every time M takes the big kids out without him. I was up and showered on time on Saturday, so we thought we’d have a family outing to the rink. Between the strep throat and Christmas the kids had missed games and practices and it was time to get back on the ice. It was a bit of a hustle trying to get all the kids fed, dressed and in the vanimal with their ringette bags, but we made it out on time. We got to the arena and hurried inside to see which change rooms we were assigned… only to notice how quiet the arena seemed. As the team names flashed across the screen, we quickly realized that ours was missing. M whipped out his phone to check the schedule… only to realize that there was no game scheduled that day.

*sigh*

So, here we all were–up, dressed and out of the house with no where to go. There was something I needed at Dollarama, so we figured we’d make a quick stop at the mall down the road to get it. It wasn’t even open yet when we arrived, so we played in the hallways for a few minutes while we waited for the stores to open. The kids were excited to be there before it opened, and Dollarama is one of our favourite stores. We roamed around there for a bit, then decided we’d go see if Santa’s castle was still up since we were already there. The kids were SO excited to ride down in the glass elevator, and were spinning alllll the theories about why the castle was still there with no Santa.

We walked a little further down the mall to let the kids stretch their legs, and found this hilarious little kiosk with motorized animals that you can actually drive around the mall. The kids beelined for them, and we decided to let them take a spin. It was quite possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen in a lonnnnng time. The kids were laughing and driving around, and everyone we passed couldn’t help but smile. I think the other shoppers enjoyed watching them almost as much as I did. For 10 glorious minutes they toured around, and S has already decided that she needs to go back for another ride on “her panda”.

We found a little indoor play place down another hallway, and my big kids looked like giants on the equipment clearly intended for toddlers. From there we window shopped at the toy store, ran some more hallways and returned to Dollarama to pay for the three items that somehow got hidden in the stroller that we accidentally stole. (Oops!)

We left the mall, made a few more stops then capped the morning with treats from Tim Hortons. It was such a simple thing, but the kids seriously had a blast. P basically pressed his entire face into his sprinkle donut and came up looking like he had multicoloured freckles

After a week of being stuck inside with strep throat, it was everything that we needed. It felt so good to get out and, you know, be around other people.

I’m really looking forward to having a week off without sickness. It also snowed today, so I’m also really looking forward to kicking them all outside to play bright and early tomorrow morning. (ha)