Good Ending to a Bad Afternoon

Michael has an opthalmologist appointment at 2:00 this afternoon. It was looking like we were going to be early to the appointment, for once. I got Katie loaded up into her carseat and looked outside. It was raining....again! So I told Michael that he needed to wear his raincoat because it had a hood. He wanted to wear his Spiderman jacket and after some bargaining and coercing, he put the raincoat on. I got him into the car and then got Katie in too. We headed out to the appointment, which was only 10 minutes away. As usual, we got behind some bad drivers and it took us 3 turns to get through one traffic light right in front of the doctor's office.

I parked in the lot across from the office and went to get Katie out first so that I could take Michael and we could head inside. I dropped the keys into a puddle and was getting wet as Michael took his sweet time getting out of the van. Once inside, I let the receptionist know we were there. We were about 5 minutes late. She let me know that our appointment was at their other office! Of course, that one is about 20 minutes from where we were at. She called to see if we could still come but the doctor had a meeting at 3:00. I wonder how he was going to have time to see Michael anyway as the appointments usually take at least an hour, if not longer, between the eye dilation and the wait to get back to an exam room. So we could reschedule for tomorrow morning at the downtown office or the Tuesday before Christmas or wait until next year. Tomorrow is out because Michael has preschool and I didn't want to wait until next year. So 12/22 it is!

I was pretty irritated by now as I had dragged both kids out into the rain for an appointment that wasn't going to happen. Michael wasn't really cooperating and Katie wouldn't go to sleep, even though she was so tired. I got back into the car and was going to head home because I couldn't take another thing going wrong. But we had talked about going to the library earlier and Michael was still asking about it. So off we went.

This turned out to be the right thing to do and was probably just what we needed. We got to the library and it was still raining pretty hard. Luckily we got the only parking spot right in front of the building and headed in. This is a pretty small branch of the library but I really like it. They have an area right next to the front desk with a small table, puzzles and coloring. Michael saw a page to be colored with a candy cane on it. He took the crayons and started coloring each stripe a different color. He told me that it was red and white, even though he used orange, blue, brown and pink, which he proclaimed as Katie's favorite color! About halfway through the coloring, he decided to start doing the puzzles. He told me that he needed an umbrella like the person in the puzzle. I then read him a book and let him pick out a few by himself to take home with us.

While he finished doing puzzles, I looked for a book for Katie. Last time we went, we checked out the book Daddy Hugs for her. Since Todd reads to Michael almost every night, he looks forward to that. So he was not too thrilled when Todd was reading Daddy Hugs to Katie. I found the book Mommy Hugs and showed it to Michael. He told me that I should get it so I could read it to Katie. And then he told Katie about it. It was pretty funny.

Before we left, the librarian told me that Michael must be a great big brother. He was making sure that Katie was happy in her carseat and had a book to read at home. She was laughing at him too while we were there. He was telling me that Katie likes pink and he thought she would like Mommy Hugs too.

We got back in the car and headed home. Even though it was still raining, I felt like I could see a ray of sunshine that was only coming into our car. I felt so peaceful and happy to have spent that time together with the kids. The afternoon had taken a 180 degree turn for the better and let me see that it's always better to look at the glass as half full!