A perfect Saturday morning

This was an almost perfect Saturday morning. Cailan woke up at 6:30, calling for Mommy but in a happy voice, not the demon voice that makes me bury my head under the pillow. (This is the part that was only almost-perfect; in a perfect world, he would have slept until after 7:00.) Chris called to him and told him that we were still in bed and he could come snuggle with us. Cailan kept calling for me - he never gets out of bed himself, even though his bed is just a mattress on the floor - so finally Chris went in, picked him up, and brought him back to our room. Cailan walked across the room, around to my side of the bed, singing "Where is Mommy? Where is Mommy? Oh, there she is!" and he climbed up beside me. He crawled under the blankets, rested his head on my pillow, put his hands on my neck, and said "I'm warming up!"

We snuggled in the bed for awhile. Cailan, when he's not throwing a tantrum, has been very affectionate lately, bestowing me with lots of slobbery, open-mouthed kisses. He has been tickling me all the time, too, with very gentle fluttery touches on my face an neck, saying in a really high voice "Dee dee dee dee dee." It makes me laugh, not because it tickles, but because he is so funny and cute while he's doing it.

Chris got up first and started making breakfast while Cailan and I cuddled under the blankets for a bit longer. When I got out of bed, there were home fries in the oven and a cup of coffee waiting for me - thanks, sweetie! Cailan and I read "An Alphabet of Dinosaurs" and "Amazing Dinosaurs" while the potatoes finished cooking. After breakfast, we took the blue tandem and the Chariot downtown to go to a "yard sale" at one of the bike stores. They had both new and used bikes for sale, lots of shoes, a large and strange collection of parts (including two sets of pedals with tiny LED lights in place of reflectors: the faster you pedal, the faster the lights blinked), and some bike clothes. I was infatuated with the pedals but didn't buy any; Chris found a very nice pair of not-too-tights for only $10, so they came home with us.

We went next door for some muffins. It's a nice coffee shop and bakery and was hopping at 9:30 on a Saturday morning. Cailan asked for a blueberry muffin, and it was huge. It looks like they put cupcake papers in a muffin tin, then pour batter into the tin so that it overflows all the individual cups and makes one solid muffin on the top, which they then cut apart. Each muffin then looks normal on the bottom but the top is a giant flat square, kind of like a graduation cap. Looks strange, but tastes good. There were a couple guys playing folk music in funny hats; one of them played a guitar and the other played an accordian, a guitar, a banjo, a harmonica, and sang, though not all at once. He also had tiny, circular, dark-tinted spectacles and a dashing feather in his hat.

Next stop: toy store. Cailan only makes it about 10 feet into the rather large toy store; he is stopped in his tracks at the dinosaur display. There is a set of shelves from the ground to my shoulders and probably 6 feet wide, filled with toy dinosaurs. OK, to be honest, there are a few other types of animals, including jellyfish, Sally Lightfoot crabs, hammerhead sharks, and rockhopper penguins, but it is predominantly dinosaurs. Cailan likes to pull down one individual from each species, identify it, fly it around for a bit, and then replace it so he can move on to the next one. After he goes through all the ones he can reach, he asks for help for the dinosaurs on the taller shelves. The store employees all recognize him and seem to be fond of him. It probably helps that, so far at least, Cailan always puts the dinosaurs back in their places. Apparently not all kids do this. While Cailan and Chris were playing paleontologist, I scanned the shelves for Christmas ideas. I also picked up some stickers, with the idea of making a sticker chart for potty trainig.

We finally peeled Cailan off the dinosaur display and went across the street to a shoe store. We have been buying most of Cailan's shoes from Target, but they have been falling apart disappointingly quickly, so we decided to shell out some money for actual shoe-store shoes. His new pair of shoes are high-top blue Keens. I don't know if they'll hold up any better, but they are very cute and they're easy to put on.

Last stop was the instrument store. Chris and Cailan go there frequently on Cailan-and-Daddy days. They have a large selection of nice electric pianos, which of course Cailan loves because of all the buttons and the different sounds they can make. They also have acoustic pianos, some nice and some not so much. I found an upright piano that sounds good, has a nice touch, and wasn't terribly expensive, but it is still a lot of money. Not sure where in our house it would go, either. Maybe someday...

We biked home. It was sunny and starting to warm up. The trees here are mostly done with their colors and are busily dropping their leaves, so I had that feeling of a crisp, autumn day. When we got home, I hopped off the tandem and onto my single to go get my hair cut for the first time since we left Tacoma. I was pretty happy with how it came out: getting rid of those split ends gave it a lot more bounce.