Wednesday, January 13, 2010

The Hermits Leave Home

It felt like summer here today so the kids and I decided to finally leave the house. It takes forever to get three kids ready to go. There's always one who refuses to put all of his/her clothes on and I have to be sure to pack an extra pair of pants for Finn, snacks, water, a diaper, wipes and my baby carrier. Then I have to make sure that I remember to grab my keys, my wallet, put shoes on instead of slippers and put all of the animals where they belong. Today we were ready in 45 minutes and no one was crying by the time we got to the garage. Not bad.

We got to our destination, I unloaded the stroller, paid the meter, unbuckled all three kids, coaxed Finn into the stroller, bribed Maeve to stay by the stroller and put Oren in the mei tai. We took the elevator up to the third floor and noticed that the fire alarm was going off. Yes, the fire alarm. We took about three steps and a very nice man approached us and said we shouldn't go any farther because there was smoke and he thought it smelled like an electrical fire. He was kind enough to carry the stroller down three flights of steps.

So after an hour and a half of prep time, we spent about two seconds at our destination.

It actually wasn't a huge deal because the weather was so fantastic that we walked a block to the library and the kids did some puzzles and spent a very long time in the bathroom playing with the foam soap, automatic faucet and hand dryer. We picked up ice cream on the way home and all-in-all it was a successful outing.

No comments: