errands and books and errands

As a working family, our weekends are filled with not-so-super-fun errands. You know… Costco trips, visits to Lowe’s/Home Depot, and random trips around town to take care of all the other things you can’t do Monday-Friday. They’re not the fun 15-minute trips to Target… they’re the intense errands that take up time and require kids to be in shopping carts.

Miss L is quite accommodating of our weekend errands… mainly because we pose them as “adventures” to various stores. And she usually entertains this notion for awhile, but as a toddler, she can only tolerate so much of mom/dad taking her in and out of a car and dragging her into yet another store where she can’t run around on her own and touch/grab things. Completely normal and understandable for anyone, let alone a sub-2 kiddo.

So during a recent weekend “errand” spree… we decided to toss up the routine and throw in a little bit of “Miss L” time into the mix. In this case, it was a trip to the bookstore.

While it’s not as awesome as a library, where you can take home a pile of books for free, this bookstore does just happen to be right in the middle of errands. So Mr. M could walk in the other direction to the central mall, and Miss L and I could frolic and play among the books.

Sometimes I don’t know everything that Miss L likes. On this particular trip, she was obsessed with finding books about monkeys. She’s never really into monkeys at home… but perhaps she’s forged a love of them at school that I don’t know about.

And she went around pointing out books with familiar pictures on them. “Elephants! Trees! Flowers! Giraffe! Bear…. ROAR!!!” We opened some books and read them. We flipped through others. Some weren’t as exciting inside as they were on the outside. We bustled from section to section of the kid’s reading area looking for more new and exciting things.

And, after 30+ minutes, we were ready to settle down and eat some lunch and get to the last errands before nap time. I’m happy we have another person in the house who gets a thrill out of hanging out around books!