Tysons Corner

This past Saturday, Ben and I had a good time taking Rachel out to Tysons Corner. They have a great indoor playground for kids her age - even though I tend to get a little overwhelmed w/ all the kids there after a while. Despite the mounting amount of chaos as it got later in the morning, Rachel did pretty well. She used to kinda stand or sit by the sidelines and watch everything, and now she's happy to still observe but still do her own thing.

After I couldn't handle anymore screaming and yelling kids, I mean, after we were done, we walked around the mall a little bit and took her into the LEGO store and the Disney Store. I think Ben and I had more fun in those stores than she did.....I guess we'll give it a few years. Then, we found a great candy store where Ben and I can officially now be considered 5 year olds still at heart and the meanest parents ever - all at the same time. We love Jelly Belly jellybeans, and they sold them there....ya know, the kind of candy store w/ all the bins and little scoopers so you can pick only the flavors you want (and skip over gross jelly bean flavors like microwave popcorn). So, Ben and I each gave a little giddy shout (inwardly of course) and then selected our own bags of jelly beans. We walked around the store and considered getting her some candy but never did. In our defense, she never asked for any and she didn't even seem to know that candy tastes good. So, how mean is that really? It's fine, right?

Here are some pics of Rachel enjoying her time on the playground.

Checking out the landscape first.....She gets daring and not only climbs up on the giant book, but happily slides down it!
Crawls through the tree tunnel and poses for Daddy (for a nanno second before she wanted to see the picture, of course)

She did like climbing on the butterflies, mushrooms, and ladybugs....even if she was pretty cautious about it. Then, she found the slide, and that seemed to be her favorite. She started out only going down the regular way, and then she got more and more daring....turning around to go backwards and then finally laughing while going face-first each time. She did great w/ taking turns w/ others....unfortunately, others didn't do so well w/ taking turns. Thankfully, Rachel was quite laidback and just took in the scenery while others pushed past her.