Abacus

March 22, 2011

Tonight’s adventure started out with dinner at Cheeseburger Island Style. Kids eat free on Tuesdays, what a perfect excuse to go. L liked the decor; all of the Hawaiian trinkets lined up along the ceiling, the tikis, and the ukulele hanging on the wall. To keep with the theme of the name of the restaurant, L ordered...wait for it...mac & cheese. I tried to push the cheeseburger, but to no avail. We played games while we waited for our food; tic-tac-toe on the kids menu, and a couple that I brought, Scrabble Flash and Story Cubes. Story Cubes was a new one and it consists of 9 dice/cubes, each covered with different pictures. You roll the dice and create a story using all of the pictures beginning with “Once upon a time...”. On L’s second roll, she got an abacus as one of the pictures. Before she had a chance to start (thinking back I shouldn’t have interrupted and just let her tell her story but I was curious), I pointed to the picture of the abacus and asked her if she knew what it was. Without skipping a beat she told me, “It’s an abacus.” I picked my jaw up off the table, complemented on her exceptional intelligence, and asked her where she learned that. Her answer was the last answer I was expecting. Actually, I don't think I could have ever guessed where she learned it. “From Sponge Bob!” Really?!?! And I thought Sponge Bob was just a useless, irritating cartoon. Shows how much I know. She told her story and before I took my next turn I asked her if she knew what an abacus was used for. I was impressed enough that she knew what it was and remembered the word abacus. “It’s for counting up stuff.”  Right again smarty pants! We got through a couple rounds of Scrabble Flash before our food came, complete with little umbrellas.

After dinner we went to a new bookstore in town to check it out, Grassroots Books.  They sell new and used books, music, and DVDs. Everybody gets a free book on their first visit so it fit right in with the ‘kids free’ theme. The store was pretty cool, a lot bigger than I expected, and there was an entire room of kids books in the back, complete with Cosmo, the giant flying spaceman puppet you can control with a marionette-type rope and pulley system.  L liked Cosmo a lot (darn, why didn’t I take a picture of him?) but also liked the books too. “If they have a Justin Bieber book, I’m sooooo getting that as my free book.” She was a little disappointed to find out that there was not one Justin Bieber book in the entire store, but she did manage to find a few that she liked including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by one of MY favorite authors, Roald Dahl.

We made a couple of pit stops before dropping her at home, PetSmart to look at the animals, and Ulta to look at all of the makeup and perfume. I dropped her at home, we syncronized our calendars for next week and called it an evening.

Until our next adventure . . .