Sometimes a little rain can be a blessing

Today, we jumped out of bed to head to Piedmont Park for a play date with all the families in the organization I run. What I didn't realize when I first scheduled the date 3 months ago was that it would be coinciding with the Dogwood Festival. Would it be major chaos, or a nice combination?

Maggie on the rock climbing wall at Piedmont Park

Piedmont Park is a beautiful park in Midtown Atlanta. Not quite the same as Central Park in NY, but it is our own Southern version. Unfortunately, when a festival is going on, parking can be a problem. Atlanta is not built well enough for everyone to use public transportation (that's another story), so we mostly all use our cars. Since we needed to be at the park first, we were able to find free parking (my favorite) without any problem. The families that came after us mostly ended up having to pay. Some people never even made it to the play date because parking was so problematic.

The original plan was for all 3 of us to go and then leave a little early for Maggie's soccer game. Due to last night's rain, they actually cancelled the soccer game for today due to the muddy fields even though today was gorgeous outside. That was such a blessing because we found ourselves in an amazing park, during the Dogwood Festival, and with nowhere is particular we had to be.

They actually had an amazing looking Ferris Wheel, and a bunch of other jumpy things for the kids to play on. Maggie loved it because it was an unexpected trip to the "carnival" as she called it. We were able to sit on a grassy hill and watch a frisbee dog show (very cool).  It was nice to relax and just play on such a gorgeous day for the park. Usually, we seem so scheduled, that we don't just do "whatever" in a day. But, today we did :-)