Wonderful Sunny Day

The car ride down was reasonably successful. It took the kids a little while to fall asleep, but they eventually did. Checkin at the Hotel Monaco went smootly, and we love the suite. There's a bedroom and a separate sitting room with a sofa. The decor is funky with lots of fun pillows on the bed. Last night I was able pull out the sofa bed and sleep with my daughter (10 months) there while my husband slept with my son on the king bed. That worked fine except that my back is a bit stiff this morning. Tomorrow I'll try getting my daughter to sleep in the living room and then transferring her to the king bed with everyone else once my son is asleep. We usually don't use a crib when we travel for just a few days because it isn't worth the effort required to get the kids used to it before we head home.

We all met up in the lobby this morning. There was plenty of space for the kids to move around, and lots of interesting pillows and furniture. Better yet, because the Monaco is a dog friendly hotel, there were lots of dogs for my kids to look at and say "hi" to. There was even a stand with coffee and tea so that we could get a quick fix before heading out the door.

One of our best memories from the last trip was the the wading pool at Jamison Square Park , so that was the first place we headed this morning. We took the Max light rail train to Couch street and picked up sandwiches and drinks for later at the Pearl Bakery. Then we were back on the train, taking it to the very end of the free ride area and walking the last block to the park.

My son had an excellent time splashing around in the wading pool. There's nothing I can really say about this, except that it's hard to imagine that he could be any happier. He sat down for about 15 minutes, devoured the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich we brought him, and ran right back into the wading pool. My husband, who wasn't able to join us on the last trip to Portland was absolutely delighted with how fun the park was.

Needing a snack, I stopped into Sip and Kranz and ran into my friend Robin who learned about the Jamison Park from this blog! We decided to walk our babies around the Pearl district together and get them to sleep while browsing shoes and other accesories. Perfect.

After both kids had naps (my son had his in the stroller, it's virtually impossible to get him to nap in a hotel room when there are so many exciting things to explore there) we hopped on a train to Washington Park. once there, we took the convenient park shuttle to the children's play area, which turned out to be tons of fun! After that we had a quick dinner at Whole Foods and then one last train ride back to the hotel for bedtime.

0 comments | Posted on August 11, 2007 | Save to del.icio.us

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