Happy belated Valentine's Day!

Tom signed up for a free Ham Radio class with his dad, so he was gone most of the day on Saturday (and will be gone again this coming Saturday). While he was out Stasa and I took a trip to the mall for some play time in the play place. I've learned that if you go right before the mall opens there are only a handful of other little kids there - it's the perfect time for her to play. Only this time she ended up getting punched (luckily not too hard) for "looking at" another kid. Or at least that was his reasoning. His mom put him in a time-out for all of 2 seconds. 


Almost every time we go to the play place we run into our friends Pradeep and Maureen and their 2 kids. This time was no exception. So Stas and I had lunch with them and then rode the carousel in the food court. She's been begging to ride it for months and I finally caved. Halfway through the ride she was begging to get down so I don't see more carousel rides in our future.


The best part of Saturday play place time? It wears her out and she takes the longest nap. After nap we played around and she insisted that I "cheese" for her.






And yes she picked out her own outfit.



Sunday we ran errands and then went out for an early Valentine's Day dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Stasa entertained herself while we waited to be seated by sitting next to a random little girl and drooling over all of the cheesecakes in the display case. Needless to say she was ready for dessert by the time we were seated and was thrilled when we ordered cake at the end of the meal. 


And of course she dressed appropriately for the occasion.






After dinner we felt like we needed to walk off some of the calories we'd just inhaled so we walked over to the mall for one of my favorite passtime - mall-walking. And that's when I got suckered into finally riding the mall train with Stasa. She loves that train more than anything else and will happily watch it chug around the mall for hours. I swear she can hear it a mile away. The whole time we were on the train (all 10 minutes) she happily exclaimed "CHOO-CHOO!" and waved to everyone walking by. Happy as a clam. And she didn't even get upset when the ride was over; just waved good-bye to the choo-choo and went on her way.