Cabbage Patch Kids

Started out our morning with a great, free continental breakfast at the hotel today. We fixed two totally separate kinds of plates for each of the girls, but it turned out they wanted what the other had, so they just shared everything on both plates.

Then we went a block over past the main square in cute downtown Dahlonega, to a super cool local coffee shop for a fancy iced hazelnut & caramel latte before hitting the road.

And then it was time for our final activity, a big surprise for the girls. On our way back home from Nashville at the beginning of the month, we stopped at a Georgia welcome center for a pit stop, and the ladies working there loved the girls, and were chatting so much with them, and finding them brochures and magazines to send with us in the car. Well, one of the ones they gave to Addison was for the Cabbage Patch Kids “hospital,” Babyland, in North Georgia. They have been obsessed with that ever since then, and asked so many time when could we go. So once we realized we needed to split our drive home from WV into two days, we decided to try to work it out to take them on our way back home.

Well, it ended up working out perfectly to stay in Dahlonega last night, and then we only had to drive 20 minutes back East to go back to Cleveland, GA to visit Babyland. It’s actually free entrance, but then of course there’s hundreds of babies in there for adoption 🙂 We knew it might be a bit of a splurge to adopt these special babies, but I wanted this special experience for them, because I actually have a few vague memories of coming here as a child on family vacations back in the day. I wanted my girls to have these memories, and have these special babies, that they will hopefully love and cherish for years to come!

We kept this a secret until we pulled into the parking lot, and just let Emerson read the signs on her own. She immediately knew where we were, and was so extremely excited, as we knew she would be. They were absolutely bouncing around the place, dying to get in and see all those little babies.

They have hundreds of babies in there, from literally all the way back to when the company first started, back in the 1970’s. Some of them are super cute, and some of them are a little less-so (Emerson even thought some were creepy-looking, which I have to agree actually). But it was so amazing and the girls absolutely loved it.

It took a while for each of them to finally choose a baby they wanted to adopt, but we did end up with a couple of cute baby girls to take home with us.

Addison’s baby doll looks like a little cowgirl, and came with the name Tiffany Kate. Emerson’s baby doll appears to be sort of cat-lover, and came with the name Chloe McKenzie.

Not too long after getting in the car and finally, officially getting on the road towards home, both girls fell asleep in the car.

We eventually made it down to Atlanta and had a quick lunch, before getting back in the car. But we could see on Waze/Google maps that the interstate was basically at a stand-still for miles through the middle of the city, so instead, I just looked at the map, and navigated us through the middle of downtown Atlanta on my own, until we could get past all the mess, and finally got back on the interstate once we got past the point where it cleared up. At one point, I looked up and realized we were directly next to the historic Fox Theater, and there was a show time starting up for a special performance of Les Mis. It was just neat, and would have been so cool to see it for real!

Then after a lot more miles and more hours in the car, with a couple more potty stops, we finally made it back over the Florida line right at 7pm. And it felt so good to be back on our own stomping grounds after being away for so long!

We were too tired to fully unload the car by the time we got home, so we just pulled out some of the things/bags we knew we needed for tonight and tomorrow morning, and then we’ll deal with the rest of it tomorrow after church and lunch. But we are so, so glad to be back in our little home, with all our normal things, and to get back to some regular life stuff. I’m so grateful for our time away with family, and glad we got that opportunity to take the girls to see far-off family, and to have the boys with us. I’m also glad I was able to blog while we were away, because it would have been a chore to try to chronicle that whole trip after the fact! But now, I’m ready to go to sleep in my own bed, and get a great night’s sleep…