Great Vacation, Glad to Be Back!

We spent most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at Great Wolf Lodge, a hotel with a giant indoor waterpark.  We went last year, and the kids have been talking about how much they wanted to go back ever since.  And this time, because they offered quite a good homeschooler discount, we wnet for two nights.  Which seemed like an awful long time in an indoor water park to me, but it was actually quite nice.  The place is enormous, and there was hardly anyone else there.  Except for life guards.  There were scads of life guards diligently guarding the few swimmers, and many more industriously practicing rescue techniques on dummies and on each other.  I felt no qualms about sitting in my chaise lounge, reading, as my children couldn't have drowned if they'd wanted to (though Travis did manage to dive where he shouldn't have and banged the top of his head).  I read Lee Smith's Mrs. Darcy and the Blue Eyed Stranger (it was good, but eventually the "strong Southern woman with a heart of gold who is inevitably done wrong by her man" theme got a little old), most of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, and listened to most of Sense and Sensibility.  And I also went in one of the slides a few times with the kids, where we sat in a really big tube and slid really fast through a twisty tunnel.  Just to prove that I can be a Fun Mom.  Just not very often.  The kids swam and slid for hours, and Ed and I read (well, Ed slept, but with a newspaper in his hand, which is his version of reading) and periodically got up and played in the pools with them.

When they weren't swimming the kids were playing Magic Quest, which involves running around the hotel waving magic wands at pictures, statues, etc. which are the answers to various little riddles. Travis did well enough to be a Master Magi (or something like that) -- he was So Proud! 

Katie's wand was from last year and was wonky.  We took it into the shop several times, and it worked more often than not, but even Travis, who at first was sure she was Doing Something Wrong, couldn't beat the dragon with her wand.  Oh well.  Aside from Katie's bad reaction to the heavily chlorinated pool, and the wand thing, it was really an excellent trip.

  And it is good to be home.  (And Bo ate at puppy camp and was not overwrought, and the cats didn't do any lasting damage to the house.)