Being spontaneous is not something Sara and I are very good at. So I was very proud of us for seeing an opportunity and seizing the moment last weekend.

My extended family has an enormous rummage sale every year and we had some stuff in it. Now technically, if you want to have stuff in the sale, you should help out with the sale. However, for out of towners, I think they make an exception. Nevertheless, we had originally planned on being there for the sale, if at all possible. Plus, it made a good excuse to introduce Oliver to a few people.

Plans changed, however, and we scheduled my dad and step-mom to come down that weekend, so we put all those plans out of our heads. So when my parents ended up going home on Saturday to get their dog out of the kennel, we didn’t think of it right away. After thinking about it for a while though, we said, “You know what? We could go there tomorrow.”

Thus began our “very special day” in Evie’s parlance. For her, the fact that we got her up before the butterfly lights were even on to get her in the car was enough to make it a very special day. She kept saying every few hours, “Today is a very special day!”

So we packed an amazing amount of stuff for just a one day trip (a baby adds a lot of stuff, on top of what you need for a toddler) and took off. Evie had a pretty good time. She said her favorite part of the day was coloring with the sidewalk chalk (although I still think all the adults had more fun). She did about half a block worth of pictures, including a crocodile, an ant holding her baby, a mother giraffe, bubbles, and a mommy and baby spider, as well as a really good rainbow.

On the way home both of the kids were sleeping, and I said to Sara, “I’m really glad we decided to do that!” Later I said to her, “If I ever make a statement like that again, remind me to wait until we are actually home and done with the trip.”

So what happened in between? Well, we had some bad traffic, so we decided to stop and get something to eat, because it was going to be bed time by the time we got home. When we stopped, we experienced our first full scale meltdown of both kids at the same time. Ouch. Quite embarrassing, and we were forced to run out of there with our meal half eaten. I like to think of us as a sort of roving birth control for the teenagers sitting in the next booth.

Afterwards, everybody was in a bad mood, and it was pretty rough. When we finally got all of the stuff in the house and the kids in bed, we just collapsed into sleep, without even putting most of the stuff away. It was sort of spectacular how fast everything took a turn for the worst! But as Sara said, we sort of set them up to fail, since it was a long day and everyone was tired.

So anyway, long story short, it was sort of a mixed bag. Certainly we learned a bit about handling two kids out in public, and we’ll do things a little different next time. Evie has already asked several times if today was a very special day, or how long until the next very special day. So I think we will work on including more special days in the future.