A monkey and a bubby

We spent the evening with friends, Traci and Ava, during which I bought a stuffed giraffe and a stuffed monkey for Madison and Nathan. I let Madison pick which one she wanted, she picked the giraffe. Traci's little girl got a monkey AND a giraffe. On the way home from their house, Madison commented that Ava is lucky that she doesn't have any siblings because she gets both the monkey and the giraffe. To which I responded, "Would you rather have a stuffed monkey AND a giraffe, or would you rather have a monkey and a bubby?" ("Bubby" is Madison's nickname for Nathan). Madison giggled and smiled, "I want a monkey and bubby." :) Problem solved!

So back to our evening. Traci enticed me to make the 2 hour drive (Okay, maybe it's more like a 30 minute drive, but it FEELS like 2 hours sometimes.) down to her house this evening with the promise of a "hot air balloon festival" awaiting us. Supposedly there will be 200 hot air balloons rising to the sky, kids activities, food, etc. Sounds enticing, right? We made the drive.

When we arrived 30 minutes before this supposed "lift off" and I saw not a single hot-air balloon, I began to feel slightly skeptical. However, we went in and let Madison wait in lines with hoards of people for a bouncy house/climbing wall/slide-thing; she got her HAND painted...no, not her face, her hand; and then listened to some music sung by men dressed as the Beetles. It was then that we learned that the hot air balloons that are twice the size of my house, could not take off in the current wind conditions that were barely enough to blow a hair off my face. Whatever! We turned to leave and Traci left me in a sea of lawn chairs, zig zagging through the crowd while my stroller got caught on every lawn chair, foot, purse, bag and cooler that was at the event. We finally got home to feed the children DINNER at 8pm! Poor kids. Madison was disappointed by the lack of balloons she was promised to see, and Nathan was probably wondering what in the world he was just dragged through. But the bright side is that we DID spend the evening with our wonderful friends, so despite it being nothing that we expected, we had a fun evening nonetheless!