More weekend fun

I have a confession to make...I'm kind of in love. With Cleveland.

I know, I know, it's not what you expected. In fact, more than half of you (ok, probably ALL of you) are scratching your heads right now and saying, "Cleveland? No, surely she meant... somewhere else..." But no, I assure you, I meant Cleveland.

I feel a little bit like Liz Lemon in the "Cleveland Get-Away" episode of 30 Rock, where she visits Cleveland with her boyfriend, Floyd, and falls in love with the city. You probably desperately want to watch that clip now. Lucky for you, it's right here! http://www.hulu.com/watch/856/30-rock-cleveland-get-away

There are just so many great things to do in this city, and even though we live in Painesville, it's really just a short 25-35 minute drive from pretty much anywhere in the city. It's no New York, or Chicago, or D.C...but sometimes I think that's a good thing. You get all the fun of being a tourist in your own town, without the crazy traffic and hassles that can go with a bigger city.

We had a fun weekend. Saturday afternoon we went to Geneva-on-the-Lake (NOT Cleveland, the other direction actually, but since it's a post about the weekend and it was fun, I want to include it!). It's a small town about 20 miles east of Painesville and every summer they open up the main "drag" and it's filled with street food and souvenir shops and arcades and just fun stuff. Completely up my alley:-) We played putt-putt and Aiden loved it! Sunday we went to the Museum of Natural History again (we're really getting our money's worth on our passes!). The kids had a blast, and we even got to watch the animal keeper feed the raccoons, the bobcats and the red fox! On the way home we made an impromptu stop at a cool park with a splash pad, and the kids had a great time:)

In living color...

As promised:)

Out & About...

All this great weather means us Baileys have been out and about, which is always a good thing in my book. I guess I'm just not much of a homebody, which doesn't bode well for my being a stay-at-HOME-mom, but my kids get to go a ton of fun places, lol.

Last weekend we spent two awesome days at a nearby beach, Fairport Harbor. The little boy running with Aiden in the pictures below is a friend from Progressive's son, Evan, who was born just one day after Aiden! They had a great time enjoying the sand and sun together:)

This morning I took the kids to a playground near Cleveland called Preston's H.O.P.E. You can read about it here http://www.prestonshope.com/ if you like. It is a HUGE fully handicap accessible playground, and it is completely free to the public. It is set up like a little town, complete with kid-sized buildings like a bank, a fire-station, a schoolhouse, a barbershop, etc. The kids had a great time, despite Ava being very fussy (she's cutting her molars). On the way home we stopped to get Burger King (I should have packed lunches, hindsight is always 20/20, right?) and the BK actually had an aquarium where you could sit and eat and watch the fish. Cool, right?

I hope everyone enjoyed all the great weather as much as we did! It is over for now in Northeast Ohio--we have rain predicted pretty much every day for the next week. Bummer.

Flower child

There was a huge "kids stuff only" community yard sale this morning, and I scored some ADORABLE outfits for Ava, which is great since I missed the spring consignment sales in GA. I got this cute little yellow romper set and decided to have an impromptu photo shoot. Can you believe that my flowers from Mother's Day are still alive? It's surely not a testament to my green thumb (as I don't have one, at all, lol), but they are almost 3 weeks old!

I couldn't pick just one photo, so I decided to just post them all. I want to play around on GIMP with them and do some selective colorization. I'll post those later:) Enjoy! (I'm partial, but isn't she the cutest!?)

Happiness...

Four years ago, I was a brand new stay-at-home-mom with an extremely fussy 2-month old. I spent all of my waking hours (which were many, seeing as how he hardly slept) trying to figure out how to keep him content (aka: not screaming). Over time, this morphed into me spending all of my time trying to be a "good" mother: feed him the right food, read him the right books, teach him the right things. I spent so much of my time trying to figure out if I was a good or a bad mother that I forgot one very important thing. No, not just important, but crucial. This motherhood business is supposed to be FUN! When I stop trying so hard to be a "good" mom to my kids, and I step back and breathe it in and bask in everything unique about them, I realize something that I forgot along the way: this is FUN! This is MY chance at a second childhood, my time to be home with them and have fun and relax and enjoy just BEING. I don't have to spend every second of the day planning activities, teaching them colors and numbers and writing and reading. I don't have to stress about them not eating their vegetables or using perfect manners or being potty trained. But somewhere along the line I convinced myself that I did need to do all of those things, and being a mom stopped being fun and really felt like a job that I was terrible at.

Until now.

I feel like this move has woken me up. Maybe it's the onset of summer--that feeling deep in my bones that calls me out of bed in the morning and screams, "Come and play!" Maybe it's knowing that I get a fresh start here, in a new place, in a new home, with new people to meet along the way. Maybe it's because my babies are finally NOT babies at all anymore, but growing children who can converse and laugh and make me laugh like I've never laughed before.I don't know. But I do know that I've had more fun in these past few weeks than I've probably had in the past few years. And while part of me feels sad about that, the other part is jumping up and down, throwing my arms out to the wind, holding my head up high, ready to dive in headfirst.

I'm not perfect. I make mistakes, a lot of them, in fact. There are important people in my life who I love that I'm not speaking to right now and it feels ridiculous. But this morning at the lake, I looked at my kids and saw them, I mean really saw them, and I was happy. I've spent the past 4 years trying so hard to be happy and to be good at this mom business, and this morning I sat back and let it all go. And like a butterfly I've been chasing, it floated ever so quietly down and settled right onto my shoulders, and that happiness lit me up from the inside out. I promise you, I am not going to let it go.

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." ~Nathaniel Hawthorne