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It was miserably hot today! We didn't accomplish as much work down at the lake as we'd hoped to despite our best intentions. On our way to Birmingham this afternoon, we stopped in at Chick-Fil-A, where there's a nifty air conditioned indoor playground. Dennis had the run of the place for half an hour, and then another toddler and his mom came in. She said her little boy had been pointing to Dennis and saying "baby" and wanting to come see him. She explained to him that he was just two months older than Dennis, but what does that really mean to a toddler? Anyway, Dennis was excited to see him as well, and when I set him down, he went running over to the kid, put both his hands on the other kid's shoulders, and let forth with his best ever T-Rex roar. I have no idea what this was about. Dennis was smiling the whole time, but it totally freaked the other kid out. His mom said he went to day care and she was surprised that Dennis unnerved him so. I suppose we should do some more work on his social skills, such as NOT greeting other children as if he were a hungry dinosaur...

He very much enjoyed the playground. He couldn't believe we turned him loose in there (I can't believe it either, but he was just a little too short to climb the major structures, so we were safe). It's a nice playground. The 'hamster tubes' are big enough for a parent to fit in as well, so it's not the kind of playground where we'd have to offer a seven-year-old a dollar to go fetch our kid from places unreachable to us. Dennis did finally figure out that he could climb up the big tube slide and slide down, and he did this gleefully for a while, then climbed down, went to the door, opened it, and ran through the restaurant. Fortunately he stopped at the high chair of a cute female baby to visit (flirt?) and we were able to catch him.

He enjoyed some Moo Shu Pork with me tonight at a Chinese restaurant where we ate supper while either a tornado or very strong winds raged outside. We thought it was just a big rainstorm and were surprised to see large tree parts littering the roadway when we left. In the neighborhood we visited, shingles had blown off roofs and trash cans were scattered about. We're very fortunate that we missed all that. The meal was so good that we were apparently oblivious to our surroundings! I kept hearing the word 'tornado' in a Chinese accent being spoken in the front of the place, but I just thought they were exaggerating. We're very blessed.