Tuesday school: scary dragon library/ bad judgement

So Tuesday, I thought we could go take Daddy to work and motor on to our local library. It isnt huge but it is nice and close. (Steve works different shifts each day, but Tuesday and Thursday he doesnt have to be in until 9am so they are good days for me and the three littlest ones to drive him to work so we have the vehicle all day. I say car and van and minivan interchangeably, but we have one vehicle, it is a minivan.) Well, we got there about 9:15 and it didnt open until 10! Argg. I got the idea to take them to the slightly farther away but enormous and gorgeous and huge and massive library about 5 miles away. This place is an architectural masterpiece, a glowing beacon of steel and glass, absolutely breathtaking. they have puppets and computers and a cafe and it is truly amazing. the kind of place I was ready to spend hours in. It has a tree house and a fake castle theme with a roaring dragon....and so after parking far away, setting up the double jogging stroller in the windy freezing parking lot, hooking up the diaperbag, the water cups, my coffee, the baby and her buckles and her protective blankets, reassuring Charlie over the din of the high winds and the dangers of the busy parking lot that no, there were no bugs in his stroller (there was an earwig like a month ago) and keeping Casey from darting away to his doom, we plodded in to the magic giant library.
and then
Charlie saw and heard the dragon. the neat, interesting, terribly poorly planned DRAGON, the fake dragon with Bose surround sound bass trembling "Snoring" and glowing eyes and ummm yep you guessed it, "Mama......I wanna go home. I wanna go home now. I wanna go home!!!!!!!!"

I have not been one of those moms who leaves the store to teach little Billy the lesson. I never have. I am too lazy too tired too overstrapped, I cant imagine being that cool or flexible or patient. If you are an ass in the store then there will be consequences, but I really have never just left on request. but dude, Charlie was HORRIFIED. He has a grimace on his face that only meant one thing: We had to leave. We tried to talk to him, but he was SO freaked out and upset that he was looking all around himself maniacally like anything could be scary, he was scared of the entire library. So we left.

On the carride home, he was already talking about "Its just pwetend, da dwagon is just pwetend, it is just a toy, he is not scawey." Maybe I did the right thing and maybe HOPEFULLY we can go back there someday soon.

We tried to "Still do" our regular school stuff and it just didnt work. they were off their schedules and everything was weird. We ended up playing in the basement and folding clothes and letting our bunny hop around and oh yeah-- we checked out a cool CD I did get to do at least that and we listened to it. It is Pete Seeger folk songs and it really is awesome. Lots of talking and story telling it is from 1959 and I think our adult friends might really appreciate it. We'll have to "burn a copy" and keep it. that still always feels like stealing!