Out to Lunch

Savannah has been dying to go visit Ryan at work ever since we moved here. That was something we did quite regularly back in Oregon... even when he worked an hour away we probably made it out there once every other month or more. When we moved down to Salem and the trip to his lab was down to just over thirty minutes, we probably had lunch dates at least every other week. Savannah loved hanging out at his desk and playing with his "toys" and seeing his coworkers and everyonce in awhile we arranged lunch with his cube-mate and his family, which included Savannah's friends Ben and Julia.

I'm not sure why we've never made it out to have lunch with Ryan in the past 7 months that he's had this job. I've only been to Kalamazoo twice since we moved out here and those were both just driving through on the way to Lake Michigan. (Okay, that may not be surprising for some who live here and never go to Kzoo anyway... I mean it is an hour drive. But back in Oregon, after moving down to Salem, we made the hour drive up to Portland at least twice a week. Ryan has always had a long commute and we've always traipsed all over the place, from one side of Portland to the other like an hour on the road was no big deal.)

Anyway, Savannah has always asked why we don't see her daddy's work. I guess partly it's because they don't allow children in the actual lab, and Ryan's desk is now in with all the lab stuff so we can't even go in to see where he works. Visitors are only allowed on the first floor. All we can do is eat lunch with him in the Pfizer cafeteria. Which seems like a long way to go for that.
But I knew she really wanted to do this, so since we have no school or Porter this week, I decided we might as well go for it.

When I told Savannah this morning that we were going to Kalamazoo to have lunch with Daddy, you should have seen her face light up! She was so excited all morning. We had a nice drive out and a quick lunch in the cafeteria with lots of visits from the other people that are part of Ryan's department. I hadn't met anyone from Pfizer yet, so that was nice. After lunch and a quick drive around downtown Kalamazoo, we headed home but stopped in Battle Creek to go to the mall. The kids had a blast for over an hour playing on the indoor "playground" climbing and sliding and running around on the soft stuff. I forget how much I love those indoor soft playgrounds for the kids and just sitting on the side benches hanging out with the other moms just watching the kids run in circles. Oh how I wish they had something like that here in Jackson!

So we had a great day, the kids had so much fun and were so tired out I think they were asleep in record time tonight!