Good-bye $85, or $28.33 admission to the lake

Last night, Hubby and I went down to the lakeside park to scope out the long weekend festivities and check out the beach. We have been living 10 minutes from the beach for a month now, and it's summer, and we still haven't had a single beach day. That's life with a baby, for ya. We'd have to get one of those sun protection tents for Sweet Baboo,

but more than that, we'd have to actually get motivated and organized. Plus neither Hubby nor I are huge fans of our current bodies. Most of my baby pooch is gone (don't hate), but in exchange for that good fortune I have stretch marks in some VERY unfortunate places. None on my stomach, which I could actually cover up most of the time, but tons on my legs and back. Try hiding your thighs in a bathing suit. :(

But I digress. A friend from the high school era of my life is coming to visit next week, and I stupidly told her we lived by the beach, so now we have to go there. We went to scope it out to make sure it was actually a passable place to spend the day, and yay, it is! However, after we pulled into the parking lot and were getting ready to get out, we were approached by two police officers.
"Where are you headed?"
"Here?" replied Hubby. We were both rather confused.
"Did you know your tags are expired?"
The tags on our plates were expired. We'd gotten the beater of a car certified when we bought it, but never got around to actually going down to the ministry of transportation and getting the tags to show it. Next they asked for Hubby's licence. After frantically searching through his wallet, he realized he didn't have it. See where this is going? Next they asked for the insurance papers. He found them in the glove compartment and handed them over, and the police informed us that our insurance had expired last month. Which was ridiculous, because we just bought the car in July--who gets insurance for one month? Clearly when it was issued July/20/09 and expired August/20/09 it was a typo. The genuis at the insurance company forgot to change the 09 to 10, and now we were screwed.

Allow me to add that Baboo picked the moment that the officers came to the car to start fussing and crying. I realized after a minute or two that he was hungry, so I had no choice but to take him out of his carseat and breastfeed him while my husband was being questioned.  I secretly hoped it would intimidate the cops into leaving us alone, haha.

Anyway, they went back to their car for awhile and allowed us to sweat it out, the way that cops do, and then when they came back they told us they could give us three tickets, but they were only giving us one. It was an $85 fine for driving without a licence. I know that driving without insurance is a $3000 fine, so I was  extremely grateful. I know we have insurance, the money has been coming out of our account every month, but I really didn't feel like having to go to court and fight it. That would have been way too much stress.

Our little trip to the lake wound up costing us $85. We chose to look at it as us paying $28.33 per person for admission. That makes it seem more acceptable, right?

Here are some pictures we took at the lake. The coppers didn't stop us from enjoying ourselves! At $28.33 a pop, you better believe we had a good time!

                               Baboo and I in front of the spinning strawberries ride.

Me wearing Baboo in front of the water.

Baboo and Hubby with a lovely background of trees