This is the week where Shannon is off doing a sailing course out on Vancouver Island and I have the kids to myself Tuesday until Sunday!
You just never sure how the kids are going to react when their favorite parent leaves for a couple of days. On Tuesday, we drove up to Calgary to drop mom off at the airport. Surprisingly, the kids did very well saying goodbye to their mom. There is no fuss, no crying. There was a kiss and a hug, and I told mom was going on an airplane and will be back on Sunday (of course Everett has no idea what Sunday really means), and then she was gone. He saw couple of airplanes and never would say “There’s an airplane! That’s what mom is on!” for the rest of the day.
I had decided to make an excursion out of it and visit the Calgary zoo. We went for a couple of hours for the starting and ending up with the Penguins, which happened to be both of the kids’s favorite exhibit. They were up and close, and they both enjoyed watching the penguins hobble around, dive and swim in the water.
We also walked through the dinosaur exhibit, which was a disappointment as there were only a couple of models on display. Most of it was still under construction. The zoo had a couple of hippos in along with the giraffes. We also saw some flamingos and gorillas. Sierra was most interested in the birds that were flying around. Sierra loves birds!
We enjoyed an expensive and not very healthy lunch at the café. This, of course, wasn’t totally unexpected, but to recharge our batteries so that we can do some playing at the park, which the kids enjoyed just as much as seeing the animals.
Totally played out, the kids passed out the entire ride back to Red Deer. We ended up playing on the driveway for an hour before going in for dinner, and that and then bedtime.
Storytime and bedtime turn out to be okay as well. The kids, and especially Everett, did not seem to have any problems with daddy doing the reading and snuggling as they seem to understand that mom was not home at the moment. I told Everett that I did not want him to wake me up in the middle of the night for a kiss and a hug, as it had been the routine for mom over the last couple of weeks. He told me he understood, and I had uninterrupted sleep until the next morning! What a good Bean!
