The Practical Guide To Entertaining The Cigarillo #5

After several months of hiatus due to the long, long winter, The Practical Guide To Entertaining The Cigarillo is back and better than ever and ready for spring and warm weather!   We sort of fell down over the winter months.  Our creativity was stretched a little bit:  the bitter cold kept us indoors a lot of the time and although we wanted to get The Cigarillo out sledding, we never got around to it.  (Personally, I think he's probably going to get a lot more fun out of sledding next year- but we'll see.)

However, we haven't been hibernating like bears either:

Tot Time
Mercer Park Aquatic Center

It's odd living as close to Mercer Park as we do that it took us so long to actually cross the street and go check out Tot Time, but now that we've been a few times, not only is it fast becoming a favorite of The Cigarillo's, but it's cheap ($1.50 a kid for anywhere from 1-2 hours of play) and every other day they trot out inflatable bouncy castles that the kids just go wild for.   Other than that, it's just basically a gym full of toys and play castles for the kids to go crazy on- but there are also enough Cozy Coupes in the place to fill up a car dealership and The Cigarillo hops Cozy Coupe to Cozy Coupe and loves nothing more than to sit back, relax and chill in them.  He doesn't really drive them all that much- but he does love them.

All in all, it's cheap, easy entertainment for kids and as it's just a hop, skip and a jump (literally in our case) away, it's a nice option to have in our back pockets for when the weather is colder or when we don't want to drive anywhere.

Walks
Various Parks, Trails, etc.

It may seem odd to just go for a mini-hike with your two year old, but it's something I stumbled across randomly one day.  It was one of the warmer days that have popped up now and again and I wanted to get out of the house and I think The Cigarillo did too, so after some thinking on my part, we put his boots on and headed to Hickory Hill Park and went for a walk.  And you know what?  He loved it.

There are some unusual challenges when going for a stroll with a two year old:  there's a ton and a half of new noises, sights and sounds that tend to slow things down.   He loves to stop and listen for strange bird noises.  He likes to stop and point at the mud and the last remnants of the snow.  Whenever he steps in mud, he has to announce that his shoes are now dirty ('doo!  doo!') and look at them carefully and whenever we met another person on the trail, it threw him for a loop in that:  'OMG WHERE DID THAT PERSON JUST COME FROM I'M A LITTLE FREAKED OUT BY THIS' kind of way.   In other words, it's doable, but it's slow going.  Lots of starts and stops and because The Cigarillo is a big boy now, even when he starts flagging a little bit, can I carry him to speed up the process?  Of course not.

So far, we've done a couple of rounds of Hickory Hill--  the second time I almost got us lost because it's been years since I've spent serious time in Hickory Hill and all the trails seem to have shifted ever-so-slightly but we've also checked out the Clear Creek Trail, which is paved and thus avoided excessive mud on the shoes, which is something I'm very much in favor of.   Hopefully as it gets warmer we can expand our repertoire a little bit and I know it will be very nice to go for walks in Hickory Hill without having to worry about so much slop and mud.