Yesterday we decided it was the perfect day to just get out of the house and not come back until the day was done. So that’s exactly what we did.

We started the day off by going to our favorite used bookstore. I love books and I love bookstores, but USED bookstores are my favorite. I can easily spend hours poking around – or I could if I didn’t have two kids following me around. Breanna was funny, she kept pointing out totally random books to me, suggesting that I get this or that. I went with a list of six books I would like to read and found a grand total of none of them. But hey, that’s part of the fun with used stores, you may not always find what you want. In the end, I found The Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants last year and really loved it, so I’ve been meaning to get this for awhile.

After our time amongst the books, we were hungry so we stopped at “La Belle Province” for some lunch. Because we’ve gone there several times for lunch, Breanna always refers to it as “Lunchtime”. Once we had stuffed ourselves full of greasy yet tasty fast food, we drove over to the West Island Blues Festival. We had gone last year too, but it was so hot and humid that I felt pretty awful and George ended up not enjoying it at all because the sound guy sucked. This year was hot and a mix of sun and clouds but it wasn’t humid and there was a nice breeze so we were all very comfortable and the sound was way better. We only stayed for two hours, seeing two of the bands, but it was fun.

Breanna barely sat down the entire time we were there. She danced almost constantly, at one point even getting right in the middle of the space in front of the stage and shaking it like a crazy person.

We planned to go home then, but whenever we go to the West Island, Hayley likes to go down to the water. She asked if we could please just go for a little bit, and it wasn’t very far away so we went down and watched two Labs fetching sticks in the water, checked out some ducks, and enjoyed the cool breeze coming off the water.

The kids were a bit tired when we got in the car to come home. Not that it showed.

By the time we got back home it was too late (and I was too tired) to start making our original plan for supper (chicken in an Indian mango curry sauce on rice) so we just got some fresh take-out meals from the grocery store (I love their Thai chicken and vegetables on noodles) and settled for that. We had also planned on having a family movie night but the kids were so tired that we stopped the movie after an hour and put them to bed. There was mild complaining but they were each conked out in five minutes flat so it was obviously the right choice.

George and I had some tea and watched some stand-up comedy on TV, then I took the dog for a walk around the block – it was so nice outside that I would have gone longer if I hadn’t been tired. I ended up crawling into bed right at 11 pm and I think I fell asleep before the clock changed to 11:01. We all managed to sleep until about 8:30 this morning and that felt GREAT.

There’s a lot to be said about being outside, especially when your two kids spend most of two hours running back and forth across the music festival park or dancing.

Today we’re heading out to see my parents for a couple of hours since it was my dad’s birthday on Thursday, then it will be back to the grind once I get the kids to bed – Hayley has one more week of school, then two days of “fake school” (in other words, the 22nd is Fun Day where they play all day long and the 23rd is the last day which means cleaning up the classroom, having an assembly, then watching a movie in class). Then summer is here, and we can look forward to a whole lot of outside time!