This past weekend my husband’s sister and her husband came down to visit with our niece and nephew. I had suggested this weekend awhile ago because the Yankees were going to be in town playing the Orioles and I thought it would be fun to take the kids to a baseball game now that they’re a little bit older, but I’ll get back to the baseball game in a minute. More than anything else the kids were excited to see our cats. I don’t think Scout and Charlotte shared their excitement. Our cats are generally very friendly and love for people to pet them. That doesn’t really extend so much to a couple of rambunctious three-year-olds though. The cats do not like being run at with grabby hands, and the kids didn’t get the concept of letting the kitties come to you and then petting them gently. We have a cat door leading into our basement so the cats spent a lot of time running down there, and the kids spent a lot of time like this.

After lunch on Saturday we headed to Port Discovery, which is the children’s museum in Baltimore. We had given them a family membership to the children’s museum in New York for a birthday or Christmas and they actually have a reciprocal relationship with Port Discovery so their pass worked for us to get in there as well, which was awesome. Having no kids of my own it was the first time I had been in Port Discovery. It’s pretty great for little kids. There’s lots of different areas for them to play in, and there’s a huge crazy climbing structure in the center that goes up the center of the building all three stories. They were too young to actually play in that this time, but I’m sure it will fun for them in the future. These are only a few of the things they did in the museum. I didn’t get any pictures, but I’m pretty sure their favorite part was the diner. We sat in a booth and they pretend cooked and waited on us. They might have stayed in there all day if we hadn’t told them it was time to move on.

We hadn’t actually purchased baseball tickets early enough to actually get them from the actual Orioles. Yankees and Red Sox games at Camden Yards are always pretty full especially on a weekend because you get lots of fans that come in from out of town. Add to that the fact that the Orioles are currently in first place in the AL East so that Baltimore’s fair weather fans are actually going to games right now, and the game actually was pretty much sold out. Of course who knows what percentage of those tickets were snatched up by ticket resalers. The stadium definitely wasn’t full when we were in there. At any rate we waited until about an hour before the game started and then bought some tickets off of StubHub that had dropped way down in price as they were just trying to recoup some of their money. We hopped on the Charm City Circulator, Baltimore’s free bus, and went from the museum to Camden Yards. Since we bought the tickets on the phone and obviously weren’t anywhere we could print them out we had to get them scanned off of the phone to get in, which was as little tricky and took awhile. I think everyone in line behind us was ready to kill us. Oh well. We got in. We knew the kids weren’t going to last for the entire game. We were betting on 3. They made it about 4 as we didn’t actually get into the game until the second inning and we left after the fifth. Hopefully they’ll enjoy it a little more when they get a little older and maybe if we go when it’s not quite so hot.

Sunday morning we checked out the new playground on our street. There’s been a playground there as long as we’ve lived there, but they recently replaced all the equipment with stuff for younger kids as well as replaced the mulch area it was located on with one of those rubbery surfaces that I think is made out of old tires. The kids had a great time playing on it. I’m still curious as to what else the city is doing in that park though since even though the new playground equipment is in they updated the work in progress sign there to say the project completion date isn’t until December.

They left after we had lunch and ice cream, and the cats breathed a sigh of relief.