Our weekend: Part 1 - Charlotte

This weekend was completely unplanned and "fly by the seat of your pants." I'm not one for sitting around home all of the time and I suggested that maybe we drive over to Charlotte for the day on Saturday.

I had recently read an article in one of my magazines about the Dilworth suburb and we started our trek there. It wasn't exactly the small knit shopping experience I had pictured and not many places (that I saw) that would interest the kids so we just had some lunch at Brueggers Bagels (Fran's Filling Station closed 10 minutes before we got there and part of the reason we were visiting Dilworth!) and then decided to drive over to Philips Place shopping center.

We had to make a stop in to Dean & DeLuca and let each child pick out their own dessert. The peanut butter cupcake up above is what Michael and Ryan split. Emma and Avery each picked out a few pieces of candy from the many candy bins, I had an ice cream bar and Eden had...

...a really messy chocolate chip cookie!

Ryan decided he wasn't crazy about the cupcake as he finished it off. So we're walking down the sidewalk in this nice upscale shopping plaza when he decides to gag on the rest of it. Ugh! My kids were not on the best behavior so our visit was short lived.

We made it to Restoration Hardware and Michael took a quick walk through while I hung outside with my unruly children.

We walked by P.F. Changs were we once dined (I think back when we had two or three children) and the kids posed by the elephant.

Like I said, we didn't last long at Phillip's Place and then we decided to drive around downtown. After the sight seeing in the downtown area, Michael decided we should try and find IKEA. We have never been to one of those stores so he is trying to find it via his GPS system on his phone. It's not really a surprise that IT DIDN'T WORK! So we ended doing a little more "sight seeing" in other parts of Charlotte.

When we finally decided to give up and made our way back to the expressway to head home, what did we see?!? A giant billboard with directions to the IKEA store of course.

We did make it to IKEA and both Michael and I and the kids were thrilled to learn that they had a kid's play area where they watched the kids while we shopped. It just really doesn't get much better than that some days! The kids had a great time and we even had dinner there (pizza) before we got on the road and went back home.

The weekend adventures don't stop there. They probably should have but they didn't. So I'll have Part 2 of our weekend posted soon!