Old Salem

I hate being a marathon blog-poster and writing a bunch of posts in one day, but you've got to take the opportunity when you have it with Dane around these days. I had the bright idea for us to go out to Old Salem in Winston-Salem on Saturday. It's an old historical town with people dressed up in period costumes with demonstrations of what life was like back two to three hundred years ago. I thought it would be a fun thing for us to do before we move away from North Carolina, and this Saturday seemed like an especially good one since I wasn't teaching. And since it's Christmastime, they had a cute little holiday-themed event with Santa Claus and a puppet show and whatnot. I thought it sounded cute! We will have fun! A fun family outing!

Turns out, no, it was kind of a bust. I mean, Old Salem was nice and all, but there were many things conspiring against us to make this day not very fun:
1. Old Salem is an hour + away
2. The sun was in Dane's eyes BOTH ways, there and back
3. We forgot to change Dane's diaper the whole time we were there, so he had a ginormous terrible diaper rash by the end
4. He wouldn't nap in the car on the way there like we hoped so he was grouchy
5. He hated Santa (although I expected that one--he hates ME if I'm trying to take him away from his daddy)
6. Buying an actual ticket cost $23 each, so we didn't actually end up going into any of the historical buildings

But basically, most of that was outweighed by the one shining positive fact:
1. We got a picture with Santa and it was free! Look at this!

(Sorry, it's a cell phone picture of a hard-copy picture, so you can't really see what it looks like--but there we go.)

Okay, and the other positive thing:
2. We got a couple of neat little Christmas ornaments and an awesome-looking old-fashioned family tree we could hang on our wall and they weren't that expensive!

Here are just a few pictures of the town and what we did there.

I mean, really, I'm glad we went. Because I'd wanted to go for a while and I would have been bummed if we'd left and I'd never seen what it was like. And I really like the family tree we found! But all in all, the day was kind of a bust and I was pretty glad to get home. I feel like most of the things I post I end with saying something like "We had such a fun time!" and it seems like everything just goes swimmingly, but MAN, doing things, ANYTHING, fun or not, with a fourteen-month-old, pretty much just stinks sometimes. We sure love you, Dane, but I don't think you're going to be invited on anyone's ideal relaxing Caribbean vacation any time soon.