A Little Boy's Dream Day

So yesterday Catherine headed off for Richmond with Grammy to attend the ballet there this weekend. Unfortunately they stuck in traffic behind an accident an the trip which is normally under two hours took somewhere between four and five. After sitting in traffic for a good while Catherine apparently told Grammy that she had decided she didn't want to go visit in Richmond that day.




So while Catherine was in Richmond today, Ginger and I took Quinn to a birthday party. It was for Drew over at CeCe's house. Drew had gotten some of those NASCAR power cars for his birthday. These are the sames ones Quinn goes gaga for every time we are in Toys 'R Us. So you can imagine what Quinn did for the two and a half hours we were there at the party. He did take a small break (mandated) when the cake showed up, but all the other time he was driving around the cars, trying to be a pit crew to people driving in the car, or trying to convince whoever was in the car at the time that they should let him have another turn. I don't know if you can see the walls of the room, but there are now little marks all along the wall at about six inches off the ground. All those marks are new. The turning radius on these little cars blows and the kids were constantly running into the walls, people and other stuff (like the small table with the cake and drinks on it). All in all it wasn't a big of a disaster as I was expecting when I first saw they had these cars inside. The funny thing to watch was Perry and Drew were drifting in them sliding around corner so they could make the tighter turns without backing up. Pretty impressive considering the top speed on these cars isn't more than five mph.






After that when we got home we were looking for something special to do with just Quinn. Ginger found out that the Caboose and the model train exhibit in Vienna were both open that day. So it was off to Vienna for a while. Quinn spent a lot of time watching the model trains, to the point where I eventually excused myself to go wait in the lobby for a bit. While in the lobby area I manage to sneak in a nice little five or ten minute cat nap while Quinn and Ginger were still looking at the trains until the "Conductor" of the exhibit came over and started chatting me up (probably wanted to make sure I wasn't a vagrant looking for a warm place to sleep). I think Quinn was in exhibit for over an hour before we finally pried him away to go see to the Caboose.




After that Quinn decided he wanted to go to IHOP for dinner. He loves going there but we can never go there with Catherine because of her nut allergies. He wolfed down about 5 or so Silver Dollar pancakes plus over half the fries that came with my meal (probably making up for the fact that at the birthday party lunch was pizza of which he barely ate any). And it was really nice to get to see Quinn and Ginger really bond some. They rarely get alone time with just the two of them and with Catherine gone Quinn was hanging on Ginger a lot.


To round out the day, Ginger had a stamp camp to attend. So while she went off to that Rob came over to try out the Wii (Gretchen was going to the stamp camp thing also, so he was looking for something to do). He even managed to beat me in bowling once and did a lot better in the tennis than I would have expected (except for the dent he managed to put in the ceiling when attempting a massive backhand shot). Ginger actually got home from the event around 11 (which is fairly early for a stamp camp event). The cards she made are displayed up above.