Earth Day Play (& New Shoes, Too!)

During our walk last night, I promised the kids that we could go to the playground at the North End of town today if the weather was good. The weather cooperated, so I stuck to my word and we had a marathon session at the playground. There were a few sets of kids over the couple of hours that we were there and they were all fun to play with and the other mothers and I enjoyed talking (I'm still new-ish to negotiating parental playground etiquette). Towards the end of our play time, I noticed a man and young girl on the perimeter of the playground and park area, cleaning up. I thanked him to all of his hard work (he had several bags full of junk that had accumulated over the winter months) and it turns out that every year, on Earth Day, he takes his daughter to clean up the park and playground so that everyone can enjoy a clean place to play. How cool is that?! I thought that was just awesome...and what a fabulous for his daughter!

After our visit to the playground, I brought the kids up to the outlet mall in Tilton to check out some new shoes. Ella wore an older pair of shoes last night while we were out and ended up getting a couple of blisters (even though she swore that her feet "felt great" whenever I asked her how she was doing). Imagine how much of a schmucky mother I felt like when I found out that her feet were a full TWO SIZES larger than the sneakers she wore into the store (note: those are not the shoes she was wearing last night; for the record, we'd never had a problem getting her sneakers on and she'd never complained about the fit). Now, she and Liam are sporting some snazzy new sneaks that even glow in the dark that they were very excited to show off to Nana after we visited the shoe store.

Tonight, even though we'd had a good run around the playground for 2+ hours, I did a half hour of upper body weight training on my stability ball and then did a 2 mile Leslie DVD for the lower body. I feel very good.