Woke up this morning to lightening and gray skies. YEAH! That means we're spending the morning in the library. The library here is awesome! It is super close to our hotel and offers reading areas for adults as well as the best kid's room I'ver ever seen. Its funny because we've only been here a little while but already we have our library routine. We walk in the door, the girls sprint to the kids room to play and see if there are other kids to play with, Caden starts combing the junior section for the next book in what ever series he's reading, and I gravitate to the three large round abouts with dozens of books on display. I keep meaning to ask who chooses the books that make the cut or what criteria frees a book from the obscurity of being one of thousands of titles stacked in the rows upon rows of books, but I am so caught up in reading jacket covers I always forget. I think that if I meet the display genius we would be fast friends. I am always drawn to at least half the eclectic collection of books and out of the 9 books I've read thanks to the mystery display person, only one wasn't worthy of finishing. 
This is the kids play room. There are these great murals on the walls, blocks, balls, dinosaurs, stuffed animals, books, and all sorts of activities for kids. 
Ella tells me every time we go into the kid's room that she wants her play room just like this and can we please please buy some wall paints so that I can paint the walls like this room. She would be so disappointed in the stick figures the balloon animals that would result if I put my artistic prowess to the test. This is the door leading into the kid's room. It certainly is my magic kingdom when I need a reprieve from providing entertainment and activities. I LOVE reading and so do the kids. I seriously go into bliss overdrive when I go into a library...so many books, so little time, and the smell, ahh, the almost musty but comforting smell of settling in with a well loved book. It gives me such a thrill to see mine and Jon's passion for reading passing into the next generation. Caden especially will devour books. On library days, Ella and Danali play while he and I each pick a spot on one of the couches or find one of the bean bags spread around the kids room and curl up for reading time.
After Jon got off work we decided to check out the family fun center here on base, scratch that, they call it post. Whatever, but people love correcting me about it. Anyway, the family fun center has a downstairs area with a kids play gym, arcade style games, and LASER TAG! Jon and Caden were thrilled by this discovery. We decided to gear up and fight a light beam battle in a pretty sophisticated laser tag arena against another family and some random off duty soldiers who split themselves amongst the family groupings. At first Ella and Danali joined the fray but after the section we were in pretend blew up and the lights started flashing, the jackets started buzzing, and the sirens started blaring they were DONE. The director of the fun center took them out and offered to look after them while we finished our 20 min round. I told Ella to just play on the play gym with her sister and that we would do games and stuff when we were done. So after we emerged as the victorious blue team (woot woot-we were really working hard at it-can you tell by the flush of my face?) I was surprised to see Ella playing one of the arcade games. I thought at first that maybe the director had given her money to play a game until I noticed my purse at her feet and the 50 credits she had yet to play on the game!! I asked her where she got the money for the game and with a deer in the head lights look she spun around and said, "mom I only took three moneys from your wallet!". Yup, just three moneys, two Andrew Jacksons and one Alexander Hamilton. She had fed $50 into the LAMEST arcade game but boy was she proud of all the little trinkets she'd won. And boy was she mad when I made her give them all away to the other kids in room who didn't steal from their mom's wallet.
On a little side note, we explained to her what stealing was (being disrespectful of other's property isn't new territory with my sweet little Bella but I wanted her to understand the concept and consequence of stealing) and tried to impress upon her that she should be upset about doing something wrong, not the loss of some jelly bracelets and gum ball machine toys, but her heartache was all about losing her bling. She had a right little fit that lasted the entire 45 mins it took to play out the 50 credits on her machine and continued in the car on the way home. I told her to take a breath, a drink of water, whatever she needed to do to get her self under control or we would have to pull over and she would have to sit out side until she was done sobbing. I was seriously close to losing it by this point. I had kept myself in check and tried to use the experience as a teaching moment, tried to calm her down so she would understand her punishment, but the loss of $50 bucks and then the tantrum of my 5 year old because I made her give away her ill gotten gains was almost too much. In step my almost 8 year old peacemaker, Caden. Man is he a great kid. Out of all the little toys that came tumbling out of that machine Caden only wanted to keep these three little dinosaurs. For some reason he really loved them so it kind of made up for the fact that Ella's little sticky fingers robbed him of playing any of the arcade games he wanted to play (because we were out of money!) or win any of the prizes that he had originally coveted. Anyway, she was balling and wailing about wanting her stuff back and Caden says, "Ella, you can have one of my dinosaurs". Not only that, but he let her pick which one, and she picked his favorite, and even though he had been super annoyed with her only a half hour before he gave it to her so she wouldn't be empty handed. Her tears dried up immediately and they set to playing dinosaurs in the back of the van. I don't know if the stealing lesson sank in for Ella, but the mercy lesson from my son will forever be with me.
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