Today was my first real day of vacation. As a very part-time worker, that means the first day I was not trying to do two things at once. I planned to focus on Christmas Holidays.
Of course, then plans changed.
One of my clients was offered a fabulous opportunity to pitch our products at a national level and so I ended up on the phone and laptop for much of the morning instead of taking coffee on the Eastside while Wren hammered out some Minecraft and Frost played MTG.
All was not lost. By 2.45pm we had hit the 520 bridge and were crossing from the eclectic outdoorsy nonconformism of Seattle to the high-end mall of Bellevue Square. It was busy. Driving over the 520 bridge we noticed the flashing signs announcing tolling would commence on December 29th. New speed limit signs have been installed which can change the speeds to compensate for traffic volume. Frost and Wren chanted whenever the speed limits changed. At one point they flashed from 40 mph to 30 mph as I approached causing the boys to shriek a warning.
Parking at B-S was awful. Two entrances were closed with LOT FULL signs up and we had to loop the block to enter of 4th Ave NE rather than wait in the endless line to turn into the main entrance. We let the luck duck out of the window to find us a parking and pretty soon an elderly couple waved us after them as they walked back to their car.
We were parked!
Our first stop was The Lego Store. It was standing room only. Wren had some money to spend - his birthday money from Great Granny Charlotte. He wanted to buy "fighting man lego". We looked around and he finally settled on a Pirates of the Caribbean Set which will have to be built with assistance. It has "a cage of bones."
We had dinner at Boom Noodle and then headed to Sephora to buy some scent for me. Frost and Wren tested lots of scents and Frost managed to squirt Wren in the eye with something from DKNY which burned a lot. A nice aesthetician popped Wren up on a stool and tried to dab his eye clean with a cotton pad spritzed with water but I didn't think it was working so I licked his eye clean which rather horrified him. At some point during the Sephora interlude, Frost got lost and ran out of money to buy my gift so he was stressed and upset when he finally found me.
He got lost again after leaving me at the Red Mango store with all the bags and saying "I am going to find Sephora." He thought I would stay still there, anchored somewhat by material objects and sloppy frozen yogurt but he underestimated my desire to continue with our mission.
We also discovered a gourmet oil and vinegar store which was weird because I have had "Gourmet Oil and Vinegar" on my wish list for AGES and never thought a specialist store would exist. Frost and Wren tasted vinegars and oils, much to the amusement and appreciation of the staff. They said "Children generally tune out in our store."
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| Frost at the oil and vinegar bar in Bellevue Square. |
Wren liked truffle oil but his favorite was fig infused vinegar. Frost's favorite was blood orange oil. I let each of them buy their favorite for my birthday present. Frost ate a lot of extra bread and oil to make sure he really liked them. Wren kept losing bits of bread from the poky toothpicks into the oils. The bread was really nano-croutons, not big enough to poke with a toothpick so it was not surprising.
I am also unsure whether he changed his toothpick often enough.
Oddly, I met three people who commented that I was "from South Africa?" Seriously, in months in Seattle nobody has made a point of it. The oil store carries a range from the Cape and the guy in the Microsoft Store guessed I was South African. Finally, a fellow customer in the Stride Rite Store (where we got Wren snow boots on sale) wanted to talk about all her South African jewish friends at the JCC.
We came home and the boys played.... Minecraft & Halo.
Beezle is going crazy with fierce love of the plasticized fabric on the underside of his puppy bed. He wants to kill the fucker since he has been denied access to badgers for his whole life, really. Its so unfair.
