Old Town Spring

We had another really fun and FULL day in Houston today ...

We started the day with a delicious pancake breakfast over at Nick and Rachel's house. Aunt Peg decided to join us for the day! It was cold this morning (in the 50's) as we drove just a little north of town to a place called Old Town Spring ... see the sign? Old Town Spring is a little touristy (is that a word?) place with darling stores, antiques, quaint little gift shops, yummy food, gorgeous flowers ... the kind of place where I could hang out for hours and hours ... and it even had trains for Grandpa Jones!

The first little shop we stopped in was a HAT store ~ totally hats, the entire store. We asked Nathan which hat was one he would like, and he ran right up to a bright pink broad-brimmed hat which Nicolas let him wear, but we didn't photograph ... we thought we would wait for a more boyish choice in hats for our photo op ... Nathan ended up trying on very funny hats: cowboy hats, knight-in-armor kinds of hats, sophisticated men's hats, a purple viking hat, as well as a court jester ... pretty cute, eh?
My favorite store of the day was called the WHY NOT? It was the coolest toy store I have ever been in ~ and trust me, I have been in a lot of toy stores. This was just completely stocked with Melissa and Doug quality-made and beautiful toys for every single age! We had such a fun time in the store, all playing with the very best toys!
Nathan even managed to crawl up into the window display and help himself to a table-full of neat toys ... I tried to take a picture from the outside of the shop of he and Rachel sitting in the window display, but the reflection makes it hard to see them clearly ...
There was an item here in the store that I just could not walk away from! My Emma Joy LOVES pigs ... and I got her the cutest pig item to send for her birthday, even though I can't send it until August! I just couldn't leave it in the store and not buy it for her!

Queenie Nia enjoyed shopping in all of the fancy girl stores with her mom, Aunt Peg and me. We all made some fun purchases and enjoyed ourselves hugely!

We ate our lunch at The Loose Caboose! We did this just for Grandpa Jones. We didn't really want to eat there, but we wanted to make sure he had fun today too! Wasn't that nice of us?

All around Old Town Spring were beautiful flower displays ... I took tons of pictures, but I'm still not using my camera right half the time, so many of my pictures were not focused correctly. Oh well, I will learn eventually ...

While we were in town three different trains zoomed on by ~ I think Grandpa was on hand for two of them. He took lots and lots of pictures of trains and tracks and signals ... Nathan enjoyd seeing the trains too.
We spent quite a few hours just hanging out in this pretty place ... and then Rachel's parents met us out there ~ they are here on spring break to visit Nick and Rachel and the kiddos.
Nathan was happy to see his "Granny McNeil" ~ they are here for the next couple of days.
Mr. Jones, Aunt Peg and I were exhausted at this point and went back to Houston soon after the McNeil's arrival. We wanted to give them some time to rest after their long trip from Grand Rapids, and have a nice evening just visiting together ... but we certainly had a great day at Old Town Spring!