A gorgeous fall afternoon

Well, if your a/c has to stop working properly, I suppose fall is as good a time as any. Ours is running, but not cooling - may be time for more freon...they're supposed to come out and check it. Until then, we've been instructed to not run it at all. Eek! Don't they know we have 4 small children and a pregnant lady in the house? This is a house w/o good cross air currents as well, but we're trying by leaving the front door wide open and the windows on the back of the house open as well. We're getting a slight breeze and thankfully it's not THAT hot today. Whew!

However, at lunchtime I needed a break and loaded up the crew for an outing and hopefully a bit of cooler air in the car for a short while. We decided to also see if a new local park had been completed since the last time we drove past it. After a quick stop at the post office, we drove by the park and hooray, it looked ready for play! So, just down the way a little farther we picked up hamburgers and headed back to the park. Sadly, no picnic tables, so we ate in the car and then hopped out to enjoy the new playground. The breeze today is WON-DER-FUL and COOOOL - just what we need considering our a/c woes. The playground is definitely for bigger children and I felt pretty much okay w/the older 3 on it, but there were too many gaps and so forth for Mr. A in my opinion. Did that stop him? No. He wanted to get up there w/his brother and sisters naturally. So, what's a 6 mos. pregnant mama to do? Sigh. I'm sure CKB would've had a heart attack if he'd been there (well, if he'd been there, HE'D have been doing what I'm about to confess doing), but I did carefully climb up the steps with Mr. A to make sure he made it to the top of the slide safely - instructed him to sit and wait - slowly walked back down and went to the bottom of said slide and after taking his picture (of course), told him he could come on down!

Now, you'd think once would be enough right? Ha ha. No. Of course not! Mr. A was ready to go again, but this time he wanted to do the twirly slide. Ack. I wasn't too thrilled about him going down that one alone...I took him up, looked at it and how far down it was and decided the best thing would be for me to take him down on my lap. Yes, I know. I shouldn't have. But, it's done now. He enjoyed it and I told him no more playground, we could go and swing and that was it. Thankfully he didn't fuss - he's good like that. So, he sat on a big boy swing and I sat next to him on a swing and gave him a gentle push now and then. After a while, the older 3 came over to swing a bit too and then I gave them the "final slide" call and they all ran to go down one more slide before we left and then headed to the car. It was a beautiful afternoon - the weather is absolutely gorgeous - nice breeze, perfect temp. - oh to have many more fall days like this before winter comes.

Here are a few pics from our outing - I amazingly managed to grab the camera on our way out the door today - I usually *want* to take it, but don't want to have to keep up with it when I know I'll be busy w/the children (read: Mr. A is a handful and a half), so I was glad to have it today and snap a few pics of the children enjoying the day and the new playground we found.

Here's Mr. A hollering into the megaphone that in turn would output his voice up at the top of the playground where his sister was listening - thankfully this part was down on the ground level!



Here is a shot of all 4 children sitting still for a few seconds :)





And, as if it's not hard enough to get a decent picture of all 4 sitting still, I had to go and try for a shot of them on the swings...with the swings moving!



Here's Mr. A waiting for me to let him come down the slide - he's a good little guy to wait, isn't he? :) He listens to his mama most of the time!





And here we have the death defying twirly slide...don't be too mad at me CKB, I'm ok and baby girl is kicking away as I sit and type this - I think she enjoyed the activity - whew - I'm a tad tired now though - pitiful, eh? :)



If the weather is nice where you are, get out there, it probably won't last long!