As mentioned previously, Kelley and Daddy visited a mall on Saturday. For my part, this counts as my Annual Mall Visit. I'm a real stay-in, the mall's not my scene. Give me click-n-mortor over brick-n-mortor in almost all cases.

Anyway, the mall has three levels. And many escalators. And Kelly likes escalators. A lot. Like for an hour. Of nothing else. But riding up and down. And down and up. Rinse and repeat. And ignore the stares of the people sitting there watching you. At least security seemed uninterested.

Not that I mind all that! Simple things keep her so happy and it was a good change from just hanging out at the house all day. In between riding the moving stairs – which she did standing on her own as well as getting on and off with no problem, holding my hand the entire time – we visited a bookstore and a toystore to look for plane-seat diversionary materials. We also visited a play area on the ground floor.

After a bit of shyness Kelley enjoyed the new play area. It's quite well designed and quite popular, at least on Saturday afternoons. To the theme of movie sets, the various large climbable features served her well. They consisted of a fairly solid yet pliable thick stickyish shiny brightly colored plastic coating of some sort. Neat stuff.

Did we find something for the plane flight? Not in the mall, but we did find Elmo! Kelley's favorite character from watching a little afternoon TV at daycare. We couldn't leave plush Elmo sitting in a box there in the store aisle, so he came home with us and got a ride in the swing at home and now occupies a favored place in the crib.

Almost forgot: on the way to the play area, while I was carrying Kelley, this group of four guys with paper name badges came over and asked me to let them take a photo of us. I aksed why and they told me they were participating in a scavenger hunt. They showed me their list of goals and one of the bonus items was a guy carrying an infant or toddler. So one of them took a photo with me and Kelley and their team members. They didn't ask names or anything and later I saw another team with the badges too. Strange, but seemed legit.



At the controls of an airplane!




Fun-house style mirror - Baby!




Kelley kept pushing this boy to go first on several times when they played together on slide ramp. He spoke only Spanish but seemed to like playing with her and they had fun together. Kelley would say "Go!" when she gave him a push.


(Photos from my low-res phone, which works better than nothing.)