Cut Rate Toys

My adventure for today was a trip to Edgebrook's Cut-Rate Toys. The purpose of my visit was to purchase a Radio Flyer Runbike to give to The Girl for Christmas. The Boy is incapable of keeping a secret (which is a good thing for a 5-year-old, in my opinion), so I brought The Tot with me on the errand.

Despite Saturday traffic, it only took us about 15 minutes to drive there. I drove up Central Avenue, which proved to be gorgeous as it wound through the Forest Reserves. Finding a metered parking spot along Devon Avenue was easy-peasy. I even let The Tot walk across the street (holding my hand, of course).

My neighbor had told me that Cut-Rate Toys was a dingy little store, but I didn't think it was that bad. It was actually quite spacious and I felt less enveloped by stuff as I have in boutique toy stores like Building Blocks Toys and Timeless Toys. It was also refreshingly not a Toys R Us imitation; that place gives me a headache after about 5 minutes. CRT had a good mix of toys -- Darda cars, Melissa & Doug sets, Lego, Brio, Fisher-Price and some party-supply quality things as well.

I found what I needed right away while The Tot discovered the train table. Cut-Rate Toys has at least one aisle of wooden train accessories (tracks, locomotives, cars, etc.), most of which are Thomas the Tank Engine or Brio. The Tot zoomed into the train table and did not move much during our 45-minute visit to the store. He cried for quite a long time when we left; he did not want to leave the choo-choos.

I had been planning to take him for an ice cream at The Chocolate Shoppe, but he wandered into a salon just before the ice cream parlor and the owner gave him a dum-dum sucker. He forgot about the trains and was a happy camper for the drive home.

Vienna Beef

Yesterday, I took The Baby to the Vienna Beef Factory Store & Cafe for lunch. It's one of our new favorite destinations because it's on the way to the Treasure Store, it's fast, and we can split an order of 2 Chicago-style dogs and fries for $4.25. The Baby loves hot dogs. Perhaps because it's at the factory, the dogs often have unsealed-at-the-ends casing, which actually works out well for me, because that is the part that The Baby has the most trouble eating, and I can just peel it off.

He sat in a regular chair pulled up to the table, although two people offered to get me a highchair for him. I assured them that he'd be fine in a chair, and he was. He looked so little and so grown-up at the same time, sitting there in his rockstar guitar t-shirt, baggy Boden jeans, and baby Cons.

We brought the paper boat of fries with us, and he ate them happily while sitting in his stroller at the Treasure Store as I looked through the racks for jeans and pants for me. I ended up with a pair of Buffalo by David Bitton jeans, bright green J. Crew pants (that I plan to cut down into Bermuda shorts), and pale green Limited dress pants (with nobody inside 'em!*). All for a mere $13. By the time we got upstairs, however, The Baby was done with the Treasure Store. He was only slightly impressed with the original Fisher-Price, made in the U.S.A., plastic horses ball I found in the housewares aisle.

The rest of my day was fairly busy as well: I volunteered to prep art projects for hanging for St. Bart's art fair on Friday, so I spent the morning stringing fishing line into different fish art pieces for hanging. I took all three kids to Target after school to buy new Big Girl Underwear for The Girl. I did laundry. And I went to book club at Elephant Thai (my entree was great, but I didn't really like the chive dumplings) and the Chocolate Shoppe (weird service, good ice cream -- I tried about 4 different kinds before settling on maraschino cherry) in Edgebrook (cute neighborhood, seemed more like Evanston than the city).



* Does anyone else recite snippets of Dr. Suess books in their head at odd moments? The reference above is to his story, "What Was I Scared Of?)