Morton Arboretum and Ice Cream Sundaes

When Steve goes away on a business trip and is gone overnight, I try to plan a lot of special things to do throughout the day to keep our minds off missing him, and for me, to help the day go by faster. With the kids not taking naps, it can be a long 14-15 hours straight with them, and by the time I go to sleep, I'm wiped out. Often on those days, I won't even have energy to read for a while before I go to sleep.

The 19th of April was one of those day. A meet-up.com mother's group I'm with had a meet-up scheduled that day at the  Morton Arboretum. We had been there only once before with the kids, and I was anxious to check out the Children's Garden. 

The kids enjoyed the pond set up for kids to dip their hands into, although many moms started to get stressed out about the kids throwing rocks into the pond, so we left after a short while.

We headed over to another section that had a slide and other equipment. Alexa liked this contraption in the picture below, although we could never figure out what it was for.

There was a small pond that had walking stones going across, so we walked across the pond to the other side where there was a sign labled Adventure Walk.

There we found these wonderful tree-house type things with enclosed ropes leading from one to another. The kids spent quite a bit of time climbing back and forth before we felt nature calling.

On the way out of the bathroom, we met people from our group, so we went back to the section of the park that had the slide. Once again, Jared became very clingy and crying, so I wasn't able to chat that much with the other moms. I think he just gets overwhelmed after awhile with other people around him. Alexa didn't last that much longer and started saying she wanted to go back to the tree houses. Oh, well. At least we were out of the house. We found some other lower ropes to climb on, went back to the tree houses for a little while and headed to the car. By now it was 1:00, and I was HUNGRY.

Jared fell asleep in the car, so I picked up burgers and fries in a drive-through and we ate at home. They watched some cartoons on TV for awhile and then played outside. We discovered our caterpillars arrived, and we looked at them for while. We ate an early dinner, and then headed to McDonald's for a sundae.

There always seems to be other kids here for them to play with, and it's one of the only places they don't actually beg me the whole time to play with them. So, I was able to read my book for awhile. YEAH!!!!