4th Street Shopping Trip With Sarah

The other day Isabel called me up and suggested we walk around the 4th street shopping area in Berkeley rather then head out to the usual park, as a change of pace. I had a little shopping I needed to do and thought it was a great idea.We decided to meet near the Peets since it was a central location and would be easy to find each other. Holly had a lot of fun running around in the court yard. There were people with dogs, and people with other babies and kids.Holly discovered this bicycle, and had a lot of fun checking out the tires and spinning the pedals, she unfortunately ended up with some grease on her hands, but that was easily cleaned up.We met up with Sarah and Isabel and decided to walk down to The Ark, a very cool toy store down the block. On the way we window shopped and stopped into a few other places, there was a lighting store that had a lot of neat things for the girls to look at, but for the most park we kept them in there strollers.By the time we reached The Ark Holly was eager to be unstrapped and allowed to explore. I let her mostly have free reign and she was pretty good about not taking too many things off the shelves.I was shopping for a gift to bring to Madelyn's birthday and this is where I found the cool fruit cutting basket. I almost bought a second one for Holly, but decided that it might be more fun to let her play with it next time we went to Naomi and Madelyn's place for a play date.Sarah isn't quite Walking yet, but she is doing a little bit of cruising and standing so she had fun playing at the train table. We kept walking, saw some fancy furniture stores and some cool paper stores. There was a pet supply store, but sadly no animals for the girls to play with.On the far end of the shopping area there was an art gallery. I wasn't able to get pictures of Holly there, because i was making sure she wasn't touching the paintings, but it was a large studio, co-op artist owned, work, display type place so I allowed her to get out of the stroller and explore. She had a wonderful time looking at all of the paintings, and I really enjoyed them as well.Our last stop, just before they were closing was Sur La Table. We were held up at the front door when Holly found this basket of multi colored metal cups. She loved them. She stacked them, took them apart and back into each other, took them out of the basket put them back in, clanged them together, she played with them for a long time while Sarah was getting a change, I think other then the toy store this was a highlight for her.