Family Vacation -- Day 4

On Wednesday, X-man and I drove to the Koret Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park. It has the honor of being the first public playground in the United Sates. In the last couple of years it went through a major renovation (like a couple million dollars) and became a playground that mixes ordinary playgrounds with public art.

On Wednesday at 10 a.m., no one was there. X-man and I had a ball running around exploring. He tackled the toddler park, then the big kid park and then he found his all time favorite thing -- a couple of slides built into a hill that were made of eco-friendly concrete. He went up and down and up and down for over 45 minutes. When he finally got tired of climbing, we headed over to the giant sand pit with tunnels to crawl through and a large wave sculpture for the kids to climb.

Out of the 10 adults that were in the park with their kids, 6 of them were nannies. I'd say this is the thing I noticed most about our stay in California. There's a clear economic divide between what is normal at home and what is normal in a giant, ritzy city. The Nannies all carried crazy large fancy bags and wore designer jeans. They were at least in Converse shoes, where as the mommy that was in tow (who spent the entire time on the cellphone) was in crazy heeled boots.

After the park, we drove over to the San Francisco Zoo. X-man's favorite part was riding the "Little Puffer" steam train. It makes two loops around the track and on the second run, you go through a tunnel and the engineer blows bubbles at the car like in Willy Wonka. We saw gorillas and mandrills and pet/brushed some goats in the Children's Museum. The facilities for the animals were recently updated for the most part. They also had awesome lunch options. And for the first time, when I picked up my side salad and fruit salad with a water, X-man asked to have fruit salad, too. Then he asked for chips -- but he picked pretzels. So I'm feeling pretty proud that he's learning by the food we're modeling.

We drove home around 3 p.m. and X-man fell asleep, which was too bad because there were some awesome views of the ocean, then the city and then the bay. We got home and I put him in the stroller and he slept all the way up to the room for another 2 hours of nap.

That night, MacTroll was supposed to be back at the hotel to release me at 4 p.m. to go out on my own after being a single parent for 3 days. But he didn't get back until 6 p.m. And he brought friends with him. They took X-man out to dinner (3 dads!) and I got to walk around and find that all the stores I wanted to go to were already closed. I did hit one gift store and picked up something for a friend having a baby. But the only thing open to me was the scary mall. And by scary I mean the mall with those spa people who bother you every 10 steps. Where there were no people in any of the stores. Where the sales people attack you and bother you like freaking 3 year olds demanding, "Are we there yet?"

But when I returned to the room at 8 p.m. the boys were still gone. I took a shower and put on my new heels that SuperShanna picked up for me from Nordstrom's and a pair of black capris I bought with Quigs and the new shirt I got with Rogers (pre-shopping rocks). And I went and stood on a street corner (yes, that's funny) and met a friend of mine for drinks. It took a while to find a bar that wasn't overrun with uber loud music, but we did it. I dragged my butt home at 12:30 a.m. It was awesome.

Tomorrow Day 5 and 6 -- the Total Family Curse.