Stay-cation here we 'go'?

This past week (and a half, for part timers like me) was vacation time for our little family. I think the last real break we had was our mini-vacation to College Station over Memorial weekend 2009, since I refuse to count maternity leave as vacation. We have a trip scheduled for July but neither of us could stand to wait that long, so we decided to try out the 'stay-cation' and booked a couple nights at Great Wolf Lodge.

I will say this...the trip to Great Wolf (as with the rest of the time off) was fun but definitely not relaxing...I think the day of the relaxing vacation is on hiatus for awhile, unless we can budget in a few nannies here and there. My dad described it best - if you take the kids, you have the stress of the kids...but if you leave the kids, you miss the kids...not sure what the solution is yet, but we have another decade or so to figure it out.

So we stayed a couple nights at Great Wolf early on in the week and I would definitely recommend it. Loved the water park. The rooms are super clean and safe. A little pricey, but considering it took us 10 minutes to get there, it had an automatic advantage, plus what vacation is not expensive? Kendall was a little apprehensive but she tried (aka we pushed her) down one of the baby slides a couple times. Trenton and I had a blast on the adult rides, particularly on the day my sister and her daughter Rachel were able to join us. I have never been a huge water park fan ever since I got a bloody nose from going down one of the slides at Wet 'n Wild and park security 'tracked me down', but I think I may be reconsidering...

Each evening the hotel has a story time, complete with singing and dancing trees and forest creatures. We only caught story time the 2nd night, of which I only saw about 5 minutes before I heard a gurgle gurgle and suddenly saw the explosion rise up on Leah's shirt. Trenton said that Kendall enjoyed it and even took a picture with "Wylie," although instead of howling at him, like the rest of the children were instructed to do, she did her classic "funny face" which I'll have to detail down below...the rest of the evening she talked about Wylie...when we asked her where he was, she explained that he was 'outside the door' but when we offered to let him in, she was no longer such a big fan.

For those of you who know me well...my feet were horribly bruised from the rides, but sadly I did not photograph the injuries as I usually do...strange since I photograph most things these days...but I didn't have much time to dawdle on the injury before we were unpacking from the trip (from which we had an obscene amount of baggage for only 1 full day) and moving the furniture around for the carpet cleaners to come Friday.

Pan to Saturday, Rangers baseball day! Yes, we did take both children and no, we won't make that mistake ever again. Oddly, Kendall was fine and it was baby Leah that put up all the fuss. I think the poor child is teething horribly and she cried for probably about 2 hours on the outing. I think I got to see a few innings, but the rest of the time was spent walking her back and forth outside the stands.

Trenton, Kendall, and Wylie

The Water Park