A Day in the Life: ATLiens

Over the years, Autumn and I's birthdays have become the temporal marker to remind us its time to schedule a visit. Maintaining a friendship about 1200 miles apart with full time jobs and two small kids for both of us is no small task. But we are definitely making it work. This fall, it was time for me to go to the ATL.

I never mind visiting the ATL. It is very much like going home to me, except instead of visiting family, it is visiting friends (which are like my family anyways, just different sorts of drama). As such, you really need a bit of time to go down there and hit up all of the people you want to see. This year I decided to take advantage of two days of school that Ellie had off that also happened to overlap with Autumn's birthday weekend.

It was just me and the kids, since Mike doesn't get much time off and it didn't seem quite worth it for him to fly down for the weekend. Of course when I was booking the trip I really didn't think much about flying down there solo with the two kids, but as the trip started to come up, I realized I may have been in over my head. I paid a bit extra to fly out of Westchester County airport as it is small and manageable. Our flight out was, lets just say not so smooth, with a mechanical problem on the plane that made me have to board and deboard 3 times with the two kids. I should also mention that flying out of HPN at 5:30pm was full of peeps in suits, and we were essentially the only family with small kids. Fortunately the kids were very good and entertained most of the people. Ellie was a very big girl and pushed her bag around proudly, which was helpful to me.

The 4 days down there flew by. We thoroughly enjoyed hanging out at the Swanns new house, which is very nice. Ellie and Chelsea were pals immediately (thanks to some serious princess costumes) and Zack and Henry parallel played appropriately. Friday I took the kids downtown to the children's museum and for a ride in the new Skyride (think London Eye). It was sort of a hilarious scene since Outkast was playing at Centennial park which is where these two activities were. You could say we looked out of place. When we were up in the Skyride we were able to view the whole scene. We had pizza at the Hansens, the family I used to babysit for which was super fun. Breakfast with the Chatigny's and Henry's birthday party on Saturday, where we were able to visit with lots of other friends including the Gersh's and Lofters. Sunday I visited with my friend Jen and her new baby in the morning and then we were out.

And through all of this was some good QT with my bestie Autumn. And some good QT with the kids. It's funny how sometimes you have to go away to do that.

Princess Chelsea and Princess Ellie. She was over the moon over this Elsa dress. Fortunately Chelsea was more than happy to share.

Grocery shopping

Heading out to the park

Henry at the park. This park is super neat because there are a bunch of scooters, cars, toys etc that people just leave there or donate once they are done with them. And it has a huge sand pit which my kids love.

Oh yeah, pulling them out of this was no easy task

Zack on the tractor at the Children's museum

I could've played in this moon dirt for hours. It was so therapeutic!

Fishing

Just looking cute

Ellie in the banana

Selfie in the Skyride. On the first ride up we all kind of got butterflies in our stomaches and got a little nervous. Both of the kids wanted to get out. It was strange especially since it is more enclosed than a chair lift.