Staying in Princeton for the weekend

It's rare that I find myself in Princeton on the weekend, but today I spent the whole day in town. Well, I guess officially I got all the way to West Windsor for the farmer's market, but that's the farthest I've gone. It's been nice to have a day to clean up the house a little and even think about some changes I'd like to make as far as moving furniture or maybe changing the color scheme in my bedroom.

This afternoon John brought the kids down and we had a great day around town. First we went to get ice cream at Thomas Sweet. There is a funhouse mirror there and Emmy had a great time making faces at himself in the mirror:



Here are Sebastian, Nathaniel and Emerson sitting outside on the steps at Thomas Sweet:

Emmy, with his fair skin and reddish hair, has always been sensitive to the sun. When I saw him shading his eyes I asked if he wanted to wear my sunglasses. The answer is obvious:

After Thomas Sweet, we headed to the Cotsen Children's Library, which is on campus at the Firestone Library. They don't allow photography, so we don't have any photos there, but the kiddos had a great time. They had a puppet theatre with tons of fun puppets, a treehouse with cushions on two levels for reading and playing, and plenty of room for fun games of hide and go seek. We didn't do too much reading there, but we still had a great time.

After leaving the library, we walked down to Nassau Street and went to Labyrinth Books were the woman working in the children's section couldn't stop laughing at the boys. Emmy in particular was being quite funny. After the loud announcement of "Daddy, I poop!" and then having a diaper change, he gets back to the little children's section and 2 minutes later announces "Daddy, I poop again!". The evidence was clear that he did not indeed poop again, so he didn't get another diaper change, but kept saying "Daddy, I poop again" and John responding with "No, you didn't" and after a few rounds of this John said "Emmy, you haven't even had time to poop again!" The other thing Emmy said was "Obama Books!". And sure enough I walked over and he had found 2 books about our current president. John said that when Emmy sees him on the news he shouts "Obama!". The woman got a kick out of that and said "I like this kid." It was cute.

We went to dinner at Triumph Brewery and thankfully they gave us a booth in the back. We might have been a little noisy, but with the baseball game on and folks already at the bar enjoying happy hour, no one seemed to notice too much:



Then after dinner we went to an awesome playground around the corner from my house. There is a really cool slide there that's made of rollers and the boys went down it about a hundred times each. Sometimes sitting up, sometimes on their bellies or laying on their backs. There was lots of giggling involved, that's for sure.




The playground is right around the corner from my garden, so when John took Sebastian back to my house to use the bathroom, Emmy and Nathaniel and I went to see and water my garden. Emmy was very happy to help out, and Nathaniel liked being in charge of the hose used to fill the watering cans. Here is Emmy watering my bell peppers (which you can hardly see behind the monster summer squash!):

And here is Nathaniel watering the tomatoes, with the summer squash on the left and some broccoli on the right.

It was a great day with the boys! I'm so happy that they got to spend the day in Princeton and that we had so much fun.

After they headed home, I went out for drinks with Bror and Amy (who I had over for dinner a couple weeks ago). The weather was lovely and it was nice to enjoy the evening with friends.

So it ended up being a lovely day in town. And now my next free weekend isn't until August.