Sunday, Unexpected

Sometimes you start out with a typical Sunday, no plans, lots of home-time. Maybe you'll finally get through that entire sink full of dishes. Maybe all the laundry will be folded. Maybe you'll do some baking. Maybe you'll order that chicken coop kit off of the internet.

Holy smokes, the shipping for that chicken coop kit is almost as much as the chicken coop! So you shift into research mode, get the numbers for all the big farm and ag stores within an hour or so from your house, and delegate the telephoning of said farm and ag stores to the husband.

And lo! The Rural King an hour away has exactly one chicken coop kit left, in the receiving department, not even on the floor yet! Huzzah!

The husband offers to go and buy the coop, but you, imagining an afternoon that is now not the family afternoon of your fantasies (Bike ride! Softball in the park! Dishes! Laundry!), insist that an hour's drive to Columbus, Indiana, is the perfect way for the family to spend a Sunday. You can listen to an audiobook in the car! You can stop on the way back for a hike in Brown County State Park and a visit to the nature center! You can check out the chicks in the Rural King!

The husband agrees (resignedly, perhaps, since HE likes to listen to AM sports radio in the car), you force the girls into clothes and shoes, you pack lunches and the microscope and an audiobook retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg, the kids pack books and toys and headphones so that they don't have to listen to an audiobook retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg, and you're off!

Wow, that audiobook retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg sure is vivid!

Wow, those kids can sure eat a LOT of apricots!

Rural King is, of course, uhMAZing. Poor Matt is left to negotiate the Great Coop Purchase while you and the girls hold baby chicks and check out the horse tack and try to figure out the soonest length of time before the girls will need new cowboy boots (the girls are not best pleased by even your most generous estimate).

Loading the coop kit into the car requires removing one of the back seats and then putting it back, and some swearing, but eventually it's done and you're on your way out of town when--what the heck is THAT?!? Is that seriously an insanely giant glass-fronted indoor playground right downtown? The van basically squeals to a stop so you can all go and check it out.

Holy smokes, it IS an insanely giant glass-fronted indoor playground right downtown!

And thus an hour passes quite amiably. You and your husband get to actually, you know, talk, without having to say anything in Pig Latin, and the children are pretty happily occupied, too:

The children are deliciously tired as you get back into the car, but, being children, they're all revved up to go again by the time you enter Brown County State Park, buy your season pass (Another item checked off of the to-do list! Woot!), visit the nature center, and figure out which hike you want to do.

Mile and a half, to the lake and around the lake and back again, uphill and a shit-ton of stairs all the way back, so yay for healthy exercise (is what you tell yourself). The hike has ravines for the kids to run up and down, and the lake has huge bullfrogs to spy on, and water to "fall" in, and tadpoles to hunt, and a conveniently tossed-aside empty water bottle left by some horrible litterer that is actually perfect to transport the tadpoles home in, and you only have to hike off-trail to pee once. 

You contemplate stopping for dinner on the way home, because the hour grows late-ish, and you DO drive right by that one ice cream shop, but common-sense prevails, for one of the components of Sunday pre-road trip, back when it was just your typical family day at home, was chicken in the crockpot for dinner. So chicken you have, you force children into the shower, you zoom them off to bed, and then you settle yourself down with a lite margarita (yes, you do drink those now, and you don't care what the haters say about diet alcoholic beverages, because you like them just fine, thank you) and the newest episode of Doctor Who.

Which, can we talk about for just a minute? I just need to tell you that in the 50th anniversary episode, I really, really, REALLY want there to somehow be yet another rip in the universe so that we can see a happy Rose and 10.5 and their four children traveling around and solving mysteries in a TARDIS grown from a piece of coral that the Doctor/Donna secretly handed off to them before they left.

And also? I know people love River, but I'm over her. Over. Her. I never liked that plot, where Amy and Rory didn't get to raise their own baby, and Rory didn't even get to hold the real version, just the flesh copy that they thought was real at the time, and instead their infant was raised by Silence creepos and turned into a psychopath who's redeemed as an adult by the love of her parents and her love for the Doctor, and I don't buy the Doctor falling into a relationship with River because even though she's all "Spoilers!", she is continually spilling info about his future with her, and he HATES that sort of shit, and couldn't it have just been a well-crafted plot on her part in the first place to put it into his head and manipulate him into being with her?

That is all.