Adventure Thursday!

I used to, when the kids were little, do "Adventure Thursday" most weeks. They were little and i needed to keep them entertained somehow. We'd do exciting things like...go to the library or the park or the store or sometimes even the fire station. It didn't take much, to be honest. Just the adventure of going somewhere.

Today i resurrected Adventure Thursday, not because the kids need entertaining anymore - most of the time, they're completely awesome at entertaining themselves with rainbow looms and books and other randomness - but just for a fun summer thing to do. I honestly wasn't sure what i was going to do, because they're not 5 anymore, and things like "going to the store" don't count as adventures.

So i started with the my best hope: There's a Frank Lloyd Wright house in town, and we'd never visited it, but it's free and...might as well! I've honestly never cared for Wright houses. Everyone would talk about how amazing they were, and i was all, "Meh. They're kind of ugly." We drove up, and ... it's was ugly.

There's a whole long movie before you even get to start your tour, and i was prepared to be kind of bored, but i was too completely aghast at the sheer amount of money that must have been spent restoring this house to be bored. I don't care about ANYTHING as much as the people who refinished this house cared about things like...painstakingly removing 6 layers of paint to restore the mural underneath. Houston and i kept looking at each other in disbelief. Zane was completely bored.

But then, once we got into the house, it was amazing. Beautiful. I could actually want to live in a house like that. The kids were even completely interested and asked really good questions. (May i brag for a second? Three separate people from our group of ten came up to me and told me how great and well behaved and delightful my children are. That's the best compliment ever.) All three kids declared the tour a raging success and declared that they'd happily go back sometime with Juanito. Yay!

We drove away, and i kind of started heading in the direction that i thought i might want to go, but then we passed a park, and the kids were all, "That looks like a great park!" So i stopped and pretended like that was the plan all along. "Go play!" i ordered. And they did.

When they started getting bored, i threw them all back into the car and headed a different direction, with thoughts of going somewhere else, but then we passed the Wealthy Street Bakery, so i pulled in there and we all had a pastry. The boys and i stuck with cinnamon rolls, because you just can't go wrong with a cinnamon roll, but Katrina decided to be daring and tried a scone, and loved it.

We then drove home and got Juanito, and then we all went blueberry picking. I'm very ho-hum about blueberry picking, because i don't actually like eating blueberries, but everyone else in my family loves them. Juanito eats them by the handful. He managed to get exactly ONE in his bucket this year. But he's happy, and he always pays extra, so the owners don't care. (They wouldn't care anyhow, i think. We talked to the main guy, and he was all, "Eating them is just part of the whole experience! It's expected!")

And then, for the final adventure of the day, we headed out to Holland for a street performers fair. There were street performers up and down the main street, doing whatever they do. And it was...fine. Some people were very good. Some were quite terrible.

By the time we got home, it was bedtime, and all of the kids were quite exhausted.

They went to sleep, and i whipped up a Pokemon pillow for Zane's birthday. it would have been quicker if i hadn't sewed one of the seams completely backwards and had to rip it out. Grrr. But i think it's cute. So. Yay!