The weather turned rainy and gray in the morning. After puttering about, we walked to a nearby place for brunch: Rhizome Café. We got there a bit before opening… I appreciated the sign on the door that said the hours were “flexible”… so we walked about for a while.

Brunch was good. I had a garden omelette (which curiously did not seem to have any garden vegetables in it other than onions) with yams and potatoes and cornbread muffins. Amanda had some sort of Mexican inspired breakfast dish. The Kai had an apple pancake with more apples and other fruits. And we had some veggie patties. Amanda and I took turns running about with the Kai outside while we waited for our food.

The place was popular and filled up quickly. Good thing we got there when it opened.

We returned to the condo to get the stroller and walked to Science World which as one might expect from the name a science museum. It was pretty nice. We learned such facts like I weigh as much as a Bighorn Sheep, Amanda as much as a Komodo Dragon, and the Kai, well, as himself. The place proved very popular as a rainy day activity for the local kiddies. I had the gut feeling that the Ontario Science Center is better, but it has been a while since I had been there. The Kai got to play with a lot of things and hopefully became smarter.

We headed back to the condo for a quick lunch and the Kai’s nap. During said nap the weather taunted us by clearing up and becoming sunny for a bit, but that proved fleeting. When we woke the Kai up from his nap (he seemed to want to sleep for hours) it had already started to rain rather hard.

Since it was raining, we drove to Granville Island to check it out and see if it was worth going to tomorrow. The jury is still out on that question, though. I am unsure if the Kai would find it amusing, although really he finds most things amusing.

The rain let up a bit so we went to the nearby Vanier Park and walked about. There are a few museum-type points of interest here, but we got there a bit late to check them out, and walking in parks is always cheap and fun. The Kai got very very wet splashing about in puddles.

After a pit stop at the condo to change the Kai’s clothes, we went to dinner at another place nearby: the Wallflower, as self-described modern diner. We had chose it because we looked on Yelp for nearby places that were good for kids. I find eating out with the Kai stressful, so being good for kids is vital. As it turned out, I would not say the place is good for kids, at least for dinner, mainly because it has more of a bar/pub atmosphere.

However, I really liked the place otherwise. They had some neat art on the wall of ostrich heads and owls and dead birds. We had a mushroom bruschetta appetizer that was awesome. Amanda had some sort of spicy veggie burger with an outrageous amount of fries and I had a halibut fish and chips. Both were quite good. The Kai just ate our food like he normally does.

As an aside, I have been eating a lot of fish and chips recently. I have to lay off it for a while.

After dinner it was of course LK’s bedtime, so back to the condo we went. We needed to do some laundry as the Kai had burned through his clothes on this trip. The building has coin-operated washers on each floor, but we needed loonies, so I had to trek off to get change. That proved slightly challenging as it was late on a Sunday night and most places were closed, but I exchanged a couple of toonies (I wish the US had toonies) at a korean grocery that happened to still be open.

Amanda started the washer, although I am unsure what she used for detergent. Perhaps a bit of shampoo? Or perhaps nothing, as we had been reading that most people use 10x more soap than necessary and usually still have soap in their clothes after washing.

We idly watched TV to pass the evening, and Amanda quickly fell asleep after transferring the clothes to a dryer. When I checked up on them, the dryer was making a horrendous racket due to a couple of lip balms (many lip balms have been lost in our washers).I am surprised people didn’t turn the dryer off because it was freakin’ loud. But I removed the offending balms, watched more TV, retrieved and folded the clothes, and wrote this weblog entry.