My Day with Grace & Olivia

Yesterday was such a fun and special day for me! I spent almost the entire day with two of the most special girls in my life…Grace and Olivia! Grace and Olivia are my friend Tina’s girls. Grace is 8 and Olivia is 6 (soon to be 9 and 7). They are on spring break this week, and over the weekend, I thought how fun it would be to spend a day with just them…us three doing whatever they wanted to do for the day…and I have to tell you, IT WAS A BLAST! 🙂

I picked them up around 10:30, we ran through the Sonic drive-thru…Grace ordered a breakfast burrito, Olivia ordered french toast sticks (that was interesting trying not to get syrup all over in the backseat 🙂 –she did very well), and I ordered a grilled chicken wrap. Off to Coral Ridge Mall we went!

We talked about different things on the way there, after eating our meals, and began to put our plan together of what we were going to do for the re

st of the day. Olivia played with Zach’s Nintento DS on the way down, and Grace and I made plans.

When we arrived, our first stop was Build-A-Bear Workshop! That was certainly on our “must do” list. They each picked out an animal to stuff…Grace picked out a tan cub bear and Olivia picked out a light green frog. They stuffed their bear and frog, put a bright red heart in each of them, gave them a “bath”, dressed them, named them, and soon their animals were ready to be taken home. I think naming them and printing the birth certificate took the longest. 🙂 It was so much fun! It had been awhile since I had this experience…especially since both Ali and Zach are getting older and don’t care to visit Build-A-Bear much anymore. I don’t think I appreciated it as much when I would go there with Ali and Zach when they were younger…today I really tried to soak it in!

So Gabbieanne (Grace’s bear) and Freddy (Olivia’s frog) spent the rest of the day shopping with us! We made just a couple stops for me…I purchased some spring-colored bright pink nail polish, with the girls’ help of course, and found a couple birthday presents for Zach. We stopped for snacks and drinks at Target to rest our weary shopping bodies! 🙂 Our last stop was the carousel. The girls sure had fun on that! Their smiles were priceless!

Our time went by so quickly. We were wanting to make it to the Children’s Museum, but decided to save tha

t for next time due to the time going so quickly. We all look forward to that!

Grace and Olivia, as always, were so polite, were so thankful and were so appreciative. Many times both of them said out of the blue, “Thank you, Julie!” 🙂 We shared lots of hugs, it was fun to hold their hands through the mall (until our hands were full of Build-A-Bear boxes and shopping bags), an

d we had lots of laughs and shared lots of smiles!

After the mall, We picked Zach up after school, which was fun for the girls, and came home for awhile to let them play here. We then picked up Ali after golf practice, and met Tina to deliver the girls back to their mom. I hated to see them go…we had so much fun and I cherished our time together! I’m trying to figure out the next time we can spend the day together again. I can’t wait! Grace and Olivia are so special to me! I know yesterday will be a day I will remember forever! And I hope that every time they look at Gabbieanne and Freddy, they will remember our special day! I love Grace and Olivia!