Lauren's fun day

Alternate Title: Lauren and the wonderful, incredible, no bad very good day.

So here's what we did yesterday - Lauren had a blast!

In the morning I took her to the Farmer's Market in downtown Rock Hill. We hadn't been before, and she was definitely timid at first. But it helped that it was very non-chaotic - in fact there were only 4 farmers there. Somehow, even though it was 9am they were already out of corn. I just don't envision myself getting there before 9 ever - oh well. I took her to each of the pickup truck beds (hehe) and pointed out all of the different fruits and veggies they had. I bought a watermelon and some cherry tomatoes and we headed back to the car... except Lauren didn't want to go back. We walked around and talked to all the farmers again. One of them gave her a tomato. She held that small perfectly round tomato like gold on the way home. That is, after I convinced her we needed to go, since more adventures were to come!

Well then she said she didn't want to go home, so I took her to Office Depot to buy school supplies for our charity drive at work. Lauren's kinda into shopping lately, and she enjoyed that trip - I let her ride in the big part of the cart and she didn't jump out once - yay!

OK Lauren- time for a grand adventure - the WATER PARK (oooooooh!) I just joined the Y like 2 weeks ago, and signed Lauren up for swim lessons that start Tuesday, and one of the local branches has a pretty sweet waterpark with a huge section for small kids. Cool, no? Here's link to the cheesy video they made of it, if you're interested. Actually it was also Lauren's first time in a big pool so it was a momentous occasion all around! So of course at first she was not into it at all. Some of the bigger water splashing contraptions were freaking her out, and she would get the quivering lip and whisper "I scared Mommy" a lot. But by the end of our 2 1/2 hour visit, she was jumping off the side of the big pool into my arms, and going down the frog-shaped waterslide in the play area all by herself. I'm so proud of her! She most definitely did not want to leave, and illustrated her opinion by screaming and crying and blubbering on while I'm trying to dry her off and get her out to the car. More screaming in car, asleep 2 minutes after we get on the road. Sheesh!

Then my girl had about a 3 hour nap. She celebrated with some yummy pizza, then we got ready for una aventura Latina. Hello Plaza Fiesta, aka MexMall!! Plaza Fiesta is such a delightful mix of treasures. It's great outlet mall sales meets stellar food court meets fantastic people-watching meets hugest indoor playground ever meets outside Latin American street scene - cobblestone and all. Love me some MexMall!!! We killed at the 70% off sale at Bass and Van Heusen. We had some slammin churros. Lauren got a balloon. She did not make us go in the ginormous playground. We had some chicken souvlaki (MexMall has incredible Greek place). Richie took Lauren to sit on all of the kiddie token rides and she was so thrilled, we didn't even have to pay to make them move. I took her to La Dulceria and bought her a sucker and me some powerball tickets.

Girl was goin bananas over the sucker. It would be clear to anyone that she doesn't get suckers often just by seeing the look on her face. She would close her eyes and lean her head back and grin while saying UMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. The whole way back to the car and the whole way home, it was ummmyummmm hummmmmmm yummmmmmmmmmm accompanied by ecstatic face-making. I mentioned to Richie - out of all the great stuff she's done today, the sucker is probably her favorite. And then she said "mmmm sucker favorite!" Of course!