The kids and I took off for the local park this morning.  Before we left, Evie was heartbroken to leave 2 new little friends.  To be clear, those friends were already off on an adventure with their parents… they were gone.  Not around.  Goodbye until dinner time.  But logic has no place in world of a 3-year-old.

I tried to comfort her.  Wouldn’t she like to go to the park? I naively thought the drive might help.  About a quarter of a miles from the site she started flat-out screaming.  That scared Jack and helped him right over the edge.  The she insisted I call Daddy.  I pulled over and called.   She refused to talk to him because… of course.  Why would she talk to him?  We started to continue on which drove us straight into full melt down again.  Nothing to do but laugh… and boy was that the wrong thing to do.  Apparently for those 20 minutes I was the world’s biggest asshole and she wanted to make sure I knew it (do I get some sort of plaque for that?  I know some pretty big asshole so if I beat them 20 minutes I feel like I ought to get a plaque.)

I turned the car around so that she could get herself sorted out with the help of Daddy.  Nope.  Wrong.  Unbelievably stupid move.  We got back and Scott came to the car.  Evie mistakenly thought he was taking her out of her car seat (oh no little one… once you’re buckled in, you’re in Mommy jail for as long as I so choose) but he was just trying to hug her.  We started out again.  Then she realized that she missed the opportunity to give him a hug and giant wet tears uncontrollably rolled down her cheeks.  It was nothing short of a complete shit show.  She was determined to be sad and mad and completely turned upside down.  I turned on the radio, headed for the highway and drove for 20 minutes with my right hand in hers until we got to the park.

The Moab community park is awesome.  Parks have changed a lot between when I used them and when I started bringing my kids to them.  This one had the normal play area plus a musical section.  The instruments are made out of pipes, wood, metal… just normal stuff.  It’s very creative.  It was impossible to pull Jack away from it.

We had planned to go biking later in the day but Scott got caught up in work and taxes.  Evie ended up playing with her friends, Jack was amused collecting rocks and worked on ideas for how to make the blog a little better.  I love it – but I already have some upgrades in mind.