Date-Day with Tater

Today is my last official day of summer; tomorrow I go back to school for staff development days, and even though I have a four-day weekend, I have a feeling a big chunk of that will be spent on school stuff. So today, I refused to even think about school (previous sentence excluded) and decided it would be Tater's day. He planned the agenda and we shared a fabulous morning together. A morning that plumb wore him out, hence giving me the time to post documentation this afternoon. :)

We started the morning at the river; we went to Kid's Kingdom yesterday and saw some newly hatched baby ducks (when Mommy did not have her camera), so of course we had to come back to check on them. Sadly, they were all gone. We're hoping they made their way down to the river, and were not eaten by hawks, like the nice man we met yesterday told us all about happening to the last group of baby ducks he watched hatch (thanks, dude).

Here's a rare Tater/Mommy pic, taken by a not-very-skilled-in-self-portraits Mommy.

We arrived around 8:15 and had the park to ourselves for quite awhile, which was really neat. I played and climbed on just about everything Tater did (except the slides - there I draw the line), so I'm counting that as my workout for today.

He went up.

He came down.

He swung for the briefest of moments... I'll never understand how a kid as fearless as he is doesn't like to swing.

Then we decided it was time to feed ducks. There is a little pond right across the street from the park, so we walked over to say hi. We took our deliciously stale bread and made some friends very quickly. Those ducks are surprisingly well-conditioned to that Mrs. Baird's bag. In the same little pond lives a random crane of some sort - he was a little snobby and too good for our bread - he opted for the native minnows for his morning meal instead.

Tater was fascinated by the minnows. They attacked the bread with as much ferocity as the ducks, but they took much smaller bites.

Finally, we moved on for the next leg of our journey - exploring across the river. We went across the same bridge I remember crossing the very first time we came to San Angelo before we moved here.

There we made some turtles very happy with our remaining bread, but that's a blog all it's own. Then it was on to the little path that leads to the Sunken Gardens. I told Tater there were two paths we could take; one was a nice sidewalk out in the open, and one was back through the woods and might be a little creepy. I couldn't contain my pride when my adventurous boy chose the creepy path. We played it up too - listening for scary noises, looking for strange bugs or other critters... when we finally got to the garden, T wasn't the least bit impressed with the flowers twice his height. He wanted to go back to the "forest," so off we went, stopping to throw rocks into the stream every now and then.

Well, by now we were pretty worn out, so we took a little snack break at the Visitors' Center. Daddy called while we were resting.

And on our way out, we just HAD to have a quick sheep ride.

And then we were ready for more playtime at Kids' Kingdom. Finally, Tater found some kids to play with and we stayed until almost noon when I practically had to drag my sweaty, sunscreen-plus-sand sticky boy away. He chose Burger King (or Kings, as he says it) for lunch, which, of course, involved more playing... indoor, air-conditioned playing this time. Finally we rounded out our date with snow cones. What ending could be better?



Poor tired, sweaty boy. Naturally, he fell asleep on the way home, and has been asleep for over two hours now. We had a blast, but the day isn't over. I'm sure the afternoon and evening will involve playing puppets, watching Bolt, and eating mac n' cheese, all the the current faves. I am just so blessed to be this little boy's mom.