Chol Hamoed Pesach Day One

We were supposed to start the chol hamoed off with a fun trip to my friend Hila's house. It's always a nice treat to get together with her and her sweet kiddies (we did so just today! ) but at that point we haven't seen each other in a while. The previous two times that we had planned on meeting, something had come up each time and it hadn't worked out.
So you can imagine how I felt having to call Hila in the morning and announcing that Adi had a bad cough and we wouldn't be able to come. Zusha also had a sore throat and Gedalya was hoarse. Gedalya (my longest nurser, who weaned less than a year ago!) is rarely ever sick. At most, he gets a hoarse voice for a day or two. B"H. Zusha, who weaned himself at 13 months, is constantly sick.

So instead of a day of playing with friends, we took a trip here:

The doctor. Adel was prescribed antibiotics. The boys weighed themselves. The two of them together weigh almost 100 lbs! With all their clothes on, the scale was vacillating between 97 and 100. I have over 100 lbs of offspring!

Not being one to spend the day wallowing in self pity, I decided to make it into an exciting trip anyway.
Around the corner from our doctor, there is a pet shop. And not just any pet shop. A puppy store! The boys fainted from joy but quickly revived themselves so as not to miss even one moment of this great event.

The puppies there were many and varied. Gedalya marched over to a worker and seriously stated that he wants to buy four dogs. I asked him if he's sure he wants four. He was.
"Why not five?"
"It will be too hard to take care of them."

But four is just right, I guess.

The little sweetie featured in this post was one of pups that enthralled my boys.

He would have enthralled my girl as well, had she been feeling up to it.
(A week or so later we visited another pet shop, closer to our neighborhood, and Adel was jumping out of her skin Ergo carrier, crying, "Aaaaaaaah-myaaaaaaaah," her word for cat, at every hamster, parrot and fish. She was definitely out of it at the puppy store, and we will have to return at a better time.)

Talk about aaaah-myaaaas, there was a cage with three itty bitty kitties in the pet shop.

Two gray and one black and white one. I wonder if all black and white cats are crazy:

My hypothesis is yes, they are, and I will attempt to prove it in a future post.

After the doctor and pet shop, we headed over to the "carousel park."
It's named (by my kids) after the wonderful red carousel that makes its home within the playground. We could not go on the carousel that day because it was too packed with kids and their flailing limbs, but here's a photo of it from back in November:

Zusha had immortalized it in craft form:

Yes, that's how much the kids love that carousel.

We had a little picnic with the food we bought in a grocery nearby. We were famished after spending half the day traveling!

We jumped off tree stumps.

And we just relaxed.

Although poor Adi wasn't feeling well, and did this...

...almost every time I attempted to put her down.

The above photo also explains why I didn't manage to take a photo of all the kids together. They were wearing sweet coordinating dressy outfits for chol hamoed. You'll be able to see if you scroll through the pictures in this post.

And finally, finally, the day wound down and we headed home.

We had the whole train car to ourselves! Fun!

And that's the end of our first day of chol hamoed.