It's Over: Part 2

Part 2A: the Great Wolf Lodge

Our second mini-trip took place in Ohio (only two hours away! It's so weird out here where you can drive two hours in any direction and end up in another state. So different than out west where you spend all day in the car just to get to Nevada. Yuck). We spent one night at the Great Wolf Lodge which was sandwiched between a day spent at the lodge's awesome indoor water park and a day at the King's Island amusement park.

The kids area with little water slides. Surprisingly we didn't spend much time in there. The kids were off to bigger and better things.
The big yellow thing is a huge cyclone. You ride on a tube and it spits you out into the cyclone, then after you sail around it a couple of times, it drops you out of a hole in the bottom. Search wanted to do it again, Destroy was not so enthusiastic, especially after going down backwards :)
These were the kids favorite slides. The were bigger than the kiddie slides but not so big that they couldn't go down by themselves. Aaron and I finally resorted to standing at the bottom and watching them go up the stairs and down the slides by themselves. Over and over and over. They say kids love repetition... well I can second that. This and the fact that I've seen Finding Nemo 96 times.

Happy campers... or lodgers.

The three boys in the wave pool.

A wolf's howl would signal the start of the waves in the wave pool. Here's Destroy mimicking the sound (Do you notice the burn on his chin? That's from going down a pole at the park while camping :). The boys couldn't get enough of the bears, wolves, etc that were all over the lodge.

Happy sliders.

This was their favorite place to play (until the lifeguard yelled at them). They were pretending to be goggle-clad hairless bears in a cave.This is the "hot tub" but it was really only like 80 degrees. It was my favorite place :) Nice peace sign(s), Destroy. Are you from China?

Part 2B: KING'S ISLAND:

The Backyardigans swing. Destroy sat under his favorite Backyardigan, Pablo. The kids LOVE the Backyardigans.The Scooby Doo ride... basically like the Buzz Lightyear Astroblasters at Disneyland, just without Zerg. But, unlike the Buzz Lightyear ride, I was actually really good at this one (you shoot the bad guys and get points)! Nancy, you would be proud.

A little boy's dream. Driving a car. All by himself. Well, not with his mom or dad. And actually, he isn't driving at all. The car is driving him. Well, the smiles were glued on anyway.Bumper cars. Wow, and they didn't even cry when they bumped into each other! Any other time they would have....My SON picked the purple one. I told myself that it was OK because he went through a pink-IKEA-cereal-bowl-only phase too and overcame it. This too shall pass.But Search picked Blue so Aaron can relax a little. It was a great day to go to King's Island because the kids were able to walk onto most rides. I can't say the same for the rest of the park though. Aaron waited FOREVER to ride "Firehawk", the newest ride. It's a ride where you are strapped down on your back, upside down, so you can't see where you are going. It was pretty intense, OK, insane. Thanks to the paret-swap card I was able to walk right up to the front of the line after Aaron did the work of the two hour wait. See? Sometime it pays off to have kids!

A flying bus. Whee.

The most progress made on this trip was that we actually got Destroy to ride on a roller coaster! The kid doesn't even like tire swings but he finally rode a roller coaster and LOVED it! And the kids became regulars on it. The workers knew them by name and they just kept going on ride after ride. Until it started to rain. Then we left. Sorry the pictures are blurry but I had to show "happy faces" and "roller coaster" all in one picture.The kids don't even know who this is. Come to think of it, I don't either. But she was big, and she was bright and it made them feel like they were in a cartoon when they stood next to her. So we stopped for a gander... and a picture. A cute family picture! It would have been cuter had I been wearing some make-up and Search didn't have the red marks of a face plant left over from the night before as we were leaving the water park. But we are all looking at the camera! At the same time! And no one is blinking! Or picking their nose, or scratching, or screaming, or fighting, or...