Three weeks ago, we got to see my brother and my sister and her family.
Barry came to Nashville that week for business, but he had most of Wednesday free. We got there late afternoon and tried to do some fun stuff. The problem with Nashville (and any city really) is that all the free/cheap kid stuff pretty much closes at 4:30 and then, well, what happens next.
When we got there, we walked around with Barry at the Opryland Hotel, which is a super super fancy hotel with indoor gardens, water, etc. This is where Barry was presenting his stuff for work. The highlight, apparently, of five different area of indoor gardens is--as anyone with kids knows--the escalator and glass elevator. So we went to the gardens and then rode the escalators until I worried about annoying people (which didn't take me long to worry about).
And then we ate at, of all places, a food court. Because it was close and people were hungry and different people could choose different foods. The kids played with and teased Barry and made lots of gory threats upon his life, which seems to be their way of telling people they love them (they often threaten to eat me; Barry was more loved than this as they enjoyed threatening things like taking off his skin and the like). Barry was concerned about our parenting skills and thought we needed to expose them to more violent TV so they could get their aggression out that way, but I'd rather they just threaten horrific deaths upon their uncle.
And then we went to this park where there is a Parthenon-type building (yes, at a park in Nashville). It was used in the filming of Percy Jackson and Mark really wanted to see it and Athena. Alas, it closed at 4:30. Mark was woefully disappointed. But, look, we got pictures.
After that we went to this sprinkler park by the river that looked positively fabulous in the pictures online, but when we got there it was a cesspool of seriously gross stuff--like, there were diapers in the water and stuff. So then we went to get ice cream. I'd found the name of a supposedly super cool place and we went there. Unfortunately, it was also a super yuppy place and a little pricey. We talked about going somewhere else, but Kip and the kids were hitting the wall (and me too--so far none of my cool ideas had turned out cool). Also I didn't think it would help to go somewhere else because truthfully, it wasn't that much more pricey than any old non-yuppy chain ice cream store like Cold Stone. I figured that if we got a couple triple scoops and shared, that would be $2/scoop and that was on-par or cheaper than even the chain store prices for kid scoops. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time or wits about me to work all this out in my head and calmly explain it to Kip, so our conversation ended up going something more like, "[sigh]--let's just get something here; we don't even know if anywhere else will be any better." "Okay, fine, you go order and I'm taking the kids over here." "What do you want?" "I don't want anything; let's just get some ice cream and get out of here." So I got two triple-scoops and liked my flavor of scoop the very best. So it was a success for me, though Kip didn't end up liking the PB/choc one I got for him (I should have gone all chocolate). And Barry wasn't a fan of the flavors so he just passed.
Then we took Barry back to his hotel room (another highlight of the trip for the kids--they almost all listed it as their favorite thing). I was really glad we went down there to see him, but on the way home I was a little sad that none of the ideas I'd thought would be fun had turned out to be that fun. Kip was like, "It's okay--everyone had fun anyway." Which seemed to be true. Barry was kick back and I think happy we were there. The kids were loving being with their uncle and it didn't matter that we didn't do anything amazing (Barry's hotel room aside of course).
Katie--your post will have to wait for another day...
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