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Ping me up brother. Always glad to see parents reaching out to each other. I'm having my coffee out in the cold rn trying to mentally prepare myself for the Sunday ahead. I just have the one four year old but each day gets a little harder to get through energy-wise.

I mentioned this in the group chat but I took the family out to put flyers in mailboxes for a socialist candidate at an upcoming local election. Kids love flyering. I was really impressed with one of my kids who could tell when they accidentally picked up two flyers, separated them out, and made sure to only put one in each mailbox. They got excited looking for mailboxes, they played with dandelions, we saw a really friendly cat that ran up to them for pats, they actually had a really good time. It makes sense since they love playing with this mailbox toy we got them, flyering lets them play mailman for real.

One of my kids also likes saying "Five HUNDRED Dollars" at the moment as well. They said it whilst holding a box of toy cars one time so I asked them how much they cost and they just replied "Three". It could have been "Free" but I'm not sure. They like to whip out the "Five Hundred Dollars" when playing, like how much pretend icecream costs, but it seems to have not made the connection across to actual things.

And my girlfriend has shown the kids the Frozen movies, which they refer to as "Ice Movie". We watched a really bad video of Donald Duck singing Let It Go that one of my kids wanted to watch again. I told my girlfriend there are no Donald Duck covers of Intergalactic, the point of difference being there is all this slop associated with the things that get put in front of kids, but if we get them into comparatively niche things like Beastie Boys songs there won't be all that secondary grifter content trying to jump on a trend.

We went out to our favorite breakfast place yesterday morning with the kids and it was a wild experience. We usually go just us, on the weekends we drop the kids off at my parents.

I guess they didn't anticipate that people might be out early and in higher numbers for mother's day. We sat and ordered drinks and it took almost a half hour to get them. The owner came over maybe 15 min later to take our order and we decided that for our youngest (3) we would just ask for an extra plate so we can give him a little off each of our plates.

When we asked the owner this, she said "Oh, OK, extra plate... That'll be $2".

She charged us $2 for an extra plate...

We learned later that the owner of this place is like this all the time. Apparently she hates when people show up and only order coffee and pastries. Several reviews stated as such. On one she replied "This is a breakfast place, not a coffee shop".

So... That kinda sucks.

We were a little defeated by the experience. We thought about just heading home, instead of going to the gardening center. But we did it anyway, and that turned out to be a good idea. We saw a super cute shop cat just walking around like she owned the place. Very friendly! The kids got a kick out of seeing a kitty in the store. We got some stuff for the garden, we also got the kids some shovels to help us out with the dirt (and for playing). We got some flowers too.

Right by the garden there is a Greenway, and we decided to take the kids on a little walk. The Greenway ran along a river, so we walked it for a bit, let the kids run loose up and down the path. It was a good diversion.

Then we spent most of the afternoon doing yard work and garden work. The kids were able to help out with their new shovels. Very productive afternoon. All and all, not a bad mother's day!