happy Saturday

I knew it was going to be a good day when it started with double chocolate pancakes with strawberries for breakfast.

I thought we would all sleep in, because we let the kids stay up later than usual last night. But of course not. I forgot – when they stay up later, they inexplicably wake up earlier the next morning. ugh.

The good side to this is that we were all up and ready to go at a reasonable enough time to hit the garage sales! We set out and ended up in our old neighborhood, going down memory lane. We’ve been gone for two years, and I’m amazed that my kids are already old enough for me to have nostalgia about their baby days. That was the hardest time of our lives when we lived in that place, but seeing it today brought back so many happy memories of playing in the garden, pushing the stroller down the hill to go swimming at the beach early in the mornings, and driving around the beautiful lake, with the narrow lanes and the little cottages all smooshed together higgledy-piggledy.

We had good luck at the sales. I snapped up a set of stoneware measuring spoons for $2 that I thought were very Anthropologie. And a pair of Ralph Lauren sunglasses for $2 (most certainly fake but they look cool). And we also found a pool ladder for $2 that retails on amazon for $65. Score!

In amongst all the bargain shopping (okay, I’m really not into garage saling, but it’s one of Rob’s passions, so in the name of love, you know…), we found our favorite little corner shop with the happy face cookies!

Then we set out to find lunch. (Yes, cookies and then lunch. Sometimes you just have to go with it.)

As it happened, we had made our way to the area of Edenville, New York, a pretty little hamlet with a restaurant called Country Dreams that serves things like all-day breakfast and family-style roast beef dinners.

It even has light fixtures made out of wagon wheels. It’s like the original Cracker Barrel.

It smelled exactly like Olde Towne Restaurant in my hometown in Kansas. How is that even possible? I don’t know, but I felt like my grandparents might come ambling in at any moment. I felt like we had gone back in time.

On our way back home the kids spotted the bouncy castle in the supermarket parking lot and begged to go until we finally relented. Fortunately it was all free. We sat there on plastic chairs watching Elliot bounce (Sophie was on my lap, too terrified to actually go in), and then the kids got free tattoos on their arms, gratis of the Shoprite clerks. We are classy, folks.

So after a happy day out and about finding cheap entertainment, we made it home just before clouds filled the sky and thunder started to rumble. Rob and I made ourselves a Pimms and sat on the porch watching the rain fall.

Garage sales, old-timey restaurant, gorgeous scenery, Pimms on the porch in a thunderstorm, time together as a family. They might seem like simple things, but for me, that’s happiness.