'Till the Sun Comes Up Over Santa Monica Blvd.

We had fun today. Matt had to work so we went with him. We got to Santa Monica around 1. Kaden and I took off to the Third street promenade and left Matt to work. Third st. is blocked off to all but foot traffic and is basically a mall on a street. The stores are all way too expensive for us but fun to look at and dream of the day that they might seem affordable to us. :) Which is probably never but I didn't say it was a realistic dream. The cool part of the Promenade is that there are always performers there on the weekends. Some famous people have been discovered there supposedly- .... Some of the stores were normal reasonably priced stores- but not many. We went to one of the reasonably priced ones- Old Navy- but didn't see anything worth splurging on. I thought about buying Kaden some Jeans but they were almost 17 bucks and I am not about to spend 17 bucks on a pair of jeans that he will wear occasionally for 3 months before outgrowing them... so even the normally reasonably priced stores seemed over priced. Then we went to a kids store called Little Piggies Wear Cotton. The cheapest item of clothing I saw in there was 30 bucks- for a swimsuit. Once again- who spends 30 dollars on clothes their children will fit for only 3 months! Craziness! They had a basket of colorful, soft, stuffed balls with bells in them. Kaden started laughing as soon as I picked one up. Watching it being thrown in the air made him giggle really hard. It was so cute! He is such a boy! He also like the trucks and a wagon they had in there. I was tempted to buy him the ball but the overpriced thing got to me- especially for something I could probably make. So enough about overpriced stores! We had fun looking around and as I said I enjoyed getting some giggles out of Kaden- those are hard to come by. After we walked around for awhile Matt joined us for lunch.

We enjoyed lunch at PF Changs. I love their lettuce wraps. Kaden kept us entertained and on our toes. He sat in the highchair at the restaurant for the first time and went through 3 straws and 4 chopsticks- he kept throwing them on the floor. He loved banging the chopsticks on the table. Future drummer? The people at the table behind us thought he was quite adorable. Kaden seemed to enjoy their conversation a lot as he kept staring at them. He also kept trying to pick up rice sticks off of the table. He doesn't quite have the fine motor skills to do it yet- he kept knocking those on the floor too. It was cool to watch him try to put his forefinger and thumb together.

After lunch Matt went back to work and I went to the library. We found the kids section and let Kaden crawl around. They had an activity room area with lots of space for him to roll around.I got some cute pics of him inspecting the big circles in thee design of the carpet.

After the library we walked back towards the promenade. On the way I found a second hand store. There is where I did my shopping for the day. :) I found 4 toys for Kaden and spent 6 bucks. :) I got him a stuffed bowling set, a green cube that vibrates, a small stuffed octopus (great teething toy), and a small stuffed fish(also a great teething toy). So far he has enjoyed them all. :) Yay for bargain shopping!

Matt finished work at about 6:30 and we headed to the pier. We took some awesome pics of Kaden getting his feet wet. I will upload pics tomorrow. It was a lot of fun. Kaden LOVES the ocean. He was jumping up and down the whole time. We watched the sunset on the beach and then we walked around the pier once before heading back to the car. It felt great. The weather was perfect and so were we. It was a very nice and interesting day. I'm so glad that I decided to go with Matt. He has to work again tomorrow so we wouldn't have had much of a weekend together if I hadn't gone with him. Anyways... You'll love the pics...