Lately there have been lots and lots of things we've had to do, places we've had to go, and people we've had to see, and it has been wearing on Kinde. She's generally pretty flexible, but more and more when she realizes she has no choice about doing X she's asked if there could be a day where she gets to decide everything. I had been thinking that could be a good birthday tradition (and it still could be), but we decided to act a little more promptly.
Sunday morning Mark and I realized that Kinde had chosen breakfast, suggested our going to the park where we were, and we had been there much longer than usual to her delight. It *had* so far been her day and we had no other commitments (assuming we were willing to continue living in squalor). We asked her if she had noticed what a special day it was yet, and exclaimed that it was her day! She had a ton of ideas of course, and we pointed out that we only had one day, and certain technical challenges. For example, she really wants to go in the stadiums and we pointed out there were no games. Overall, though, she was really reasonable. She filled her hiking backpack with lunch and snacks for all of us, and we hopped on the bus (her first two requests).
First stop was the Pike's Place Market. We smelled the flowers, sampled the produce, saw a fish tossed, listened to street performers, saw one play a violin like a bass and another act like a gold robot, and tasted Market Spice's phenomenal cider. Then we caught the bus to Seattle Center.
Though we intended to be mostly exploring outside, it was just chilly enough that we headed to the Center House to eat after gazing up at the Space Needle. There we found ourselves accidentally attending TurkFest for the third year running. Apparently we have some cosmic Turkish connection, as we don't go to Seattle Center very often, and have never tried to attend TurkFest and it just keeps happening. We ate lunch and watched folk dancers and a fashion show. We were there for a while as Kinde *loves* to watch dance. We have logged something like 20 hours over 5 festivals watching folk dancers of various cultures. We worked our way upstairs to the kid activities where both children got their faces painted and made Turkish flags.
We walked to dinner by way of the Olympic Sculpture Park. We didn't make it down to my favorite piece, Wake by Richard Serra, but headed straight over to Kinde's; Eagle by Alexander Calder. She really wanted to create her own art by dragging the chairs at Eagle's base around in the gravel as she has done before, but Pre was losing it and needed pasta stat. We pressed on across the street to the Old Spaghetti Factory, where we secured a table in the coveted trolley. Good food was had by all and we enjoyed a leisurely stroll down the waterfront at sunset to our bus stop.
Amazingly (and luckily) Kinde made it all the way home awake. We actually ran into someone on the bus who had been at the park that morning and overheard all her big plans. She was too tired to regale him with every detail as is her wont, and just confirmed that we had managed to do it all. She seemed quite content with "her day". I hope it does refuel her for following the family's needs again for a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment