Saturday
Saturday morning began on a very fun note! Chase and I had a special morning mother-son date on the books and attended a Mommy & Me Burn Boot Camp workout together! My local gym offered a 10 a.m. class for moms and their little ones in honor of Mother’s Day and a bunch of my girlfriends and I planned to bring our kiddos along to work up a sweat together (with absolutely zero expectations of actually getting in a real workout other than chasing after our little ones).
(My shoes // Chase’s shoes – Toddler Nikes kill me!)
The whole experience was equal parts adorable and hilarious and I had the best time watching Chase imitate our push ups, squats and jumping jacks. (His push ups looked like a mix between army crawling and doing the worm and his squats looked like he was booty dancing.) The older kids did a great job and actually completed the stations set up around the gym while the younger ones did their best to follow their mother’s lead. I think Chase worked harder than I realized because our normally bird-like little eater downed two bars and a pouch the minute the workout was over and wanted to make sure to show you guys…
Once we said goodbye to our friends, we drove home and ate lunch while we waited for Ryan and Sadie to arrive home from their walk. Chase wasn’t quite ready for his nap yet, so we went on a short walk with Ryan and Sadie after they returned. You would’ve thought Sadie hadn’t been outside for days judging by the way she reacted when we asked her if she wanted to go on another walk right after she returned home from her first walk. Oh happy day!
Chase went down for a nap after our family walk and I grabbed a quick shower before setting everything up to photograph my coconut hemp seed granola recipe for the blog. I also whipped up a batch of my cold quinoa salad to bring to Brittany and David’s house for an afternoon cookout!
The minute Chase was up, we gave him a snack, piled into the car and made our way north for Brittany’s daughter Kaitlyn’s third birthday party cookout and some fun with friends.
Brittany always does the most amazing job hosting whenever she plans any kind of party and outdid herself again with picnic-themed drinks and plenty of delicious food. I made myself a Lawn-Mowgarita to drink and loved it! With temperatures in the 70s, it was the perfect backyard barbeque weather and we loved watching Chase try his best to keep up with the big kids at the party while we enjoyed our drinks and burgers.
After dinner we all sang “Happy Birthday” to Kaitlyn and ate cake together before it was time to make our way home and put Chase to bed. He was clearly exhausted when we left but naturally the minute we arrived home he went into crazy overdrive mode (aka overly tired toddler mode) and started running around the house, practicing jumping, twirling and clapping before we practically had to wrestle him into his pajamas before bed. Silly boy!
Sunday
Sunday was Mother’s Day and since we’re all about experience gifts in our house, Ryan planned a family trip to the North Carolina Zoo for the day which was wonderful! After breakfast, we made the 90-minute drive to Asheboro and arrived at 10 a.m. ready to explore.
As a toddler, Chase’s primary interests include any mode of transportation and animals so we had high hopes for the zoo for our little guy. We parked in the Africa parking lot and made our way to the elephants to hopefully kick off our day on a high note.
Chase had a look of awe on his face for most of our day and seemed to love watching the animals, making animal noises and pointing at pretty much everything with a tail.
For some reason Chase has an odd fascination with turtles (and of course Ryan and I cannot come up with what kind of noise a turtle makes for the life of us…) but the turtles were dethroned on Sunday in favor of the sea lions. We easily spent 25 minutes watching the sea lions swim around and play and had to pry Chase away to keep things moving.
We took a snack break after about an hour of wandering around and shared a large ice cream cone which Chase very quickly took over. Thankfully he thought it was hilarious when Ryan or I would take a bite, so we did manage to get a few licks in from our little guy who clearly inherited my sweet tooth.
Do you guys ever find yourselves looking at pictures of families or people who seem to be alone on Instagram and wonder WHO TOOK THAT PICTURE?! Well, in this case, the nicest man saw us laughing over the ice cream sharing debacle with Chase and ran up and offered to take a couple of pictures for us. He has the same kind of camera I do (I upgraded my camera on Black Friday last year) and was very familiar with it and snapped a bunch of pics. Talk about luck, right!? What a sweet guy!
After our ice cream break, we meandered around the zoo and ended up leaving a little before 2 p.m. The zoo was HUGE (it’s apparently the largest zoo in terms of square footage in the United States) and we were all quite tired by the end of our visit but agreed it was definitely worth the drive!
Chase fell asleep in his car seat for the entire drive home which ended up being his nap for the day. By the time we made it back, he was apparently very well rested and back to his energetic self. We figured we’d make the most of the few hours we had left of our Sunday and head out for an early evening boat ride.
Temperatures climbed into the low 80s toward the end of the day, so Ryan decided to jump in the lake for a dip. Even though Ryan said the water was still quite chilly, Chase wanted in immediately after Dad jumped in the lake and didn’t seem bothered by the water temperature at all.
Chase thought getting OUT of the water was the worst idea in all the land, but thankfully some ducks swimming by served as the perfect distraction so his meltdown was short-lived.
Once the boys were nice and dry, we headed home but not before popping into the grocery store to grab a pizza and check RedBox for Moana. I’ve been endlessly stalking our local RedBox to rent this movie for the first time and when it was FINALLY available, I wasn’t going to miss it! (It was SO GOOD and definitely lived up to the hype.)
Our Sunday evening ended with pizza, (more) ice cream and Moana and I went to bed feeling like a very lucky mama!
I hope you all had a great weekend and that your week is going well so far!
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