This past weekend was my daughter's birthday and we celebrated by taking her and her best friend to Sandusky to an indoor water park called Great Wolf Lodge. It's a pretty cool place with awesome service, a Northwoods theme and good environmental policies (they compost all their food waste and even the silverware is compostable!). What perfect timing, with the torrential downpours outside prohibiting us from doing any kind of yard work. Our week of near-perfect weather has come to an end, and my part of Ohio is now once again shrouded in mist and pretty cold, with temps hovering in the 40s today. Brr!
Generally speaking, I'm not a really big fan of water. In addition to quickly tiring of rain, I pretty much hate pools, water slides, sprinklers, and anything other than my own tub or shower. Swim suits do not flatter me in the slightest. I barely ever even wear shorts, so parts of me are an obnoxious shade of white, the likes of which reflect sunlight to the extent passers-by might be blinded. It goes without saying then that I did not participate in the water-related festivities this weekend for fear of causing an accident and ruining someone else's fun.
Kiddo seemed to have a lot of fun and so did her friend, bounding in and out of the dribbling streams and racing down the twisted pipes of the slides. I enjoyed the warmth and humidity and some quality time with the book I am reading, Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life. I also got in a good deal of people watching sans CCTV cameras and made a few interesting observations, like the fact that water-based hand lotion works as a decent stand-in for leave-in hair conditioner in a pinch.
My not-so-little girl enjoyed pampering with a semi-private cabin in our room for her and her friend and a couple of calls to room service she got to make herself. Hubs and the kids made more than one trip to the arcade in the resort too, so we could all come home with souvenirs. Arcade tickets, the kind you get for winning the games, are like pay for these kids. Deciding how to spend that hard earned substitute for cash is agonizing! It was interesting to watch: they stand wringing the tickets in sweat-coated palms...and it is so hard for them to choose their prize for fear of making a choice and regretting it later, having wasted all their money on tokens and hours of time to earn the tickets. They really want their decision to be a good one, to really count. Watching them reminded me of how I feel each time I whip out my debit card, apprehensive but hopeful.
It was good to be doing something constructive and out of the rain, but I'm glad to be home with my fur wearing friends, especially my dog. I swear the grass here grew six inches in the 48 hours we were gone. Dandelion stalks now reach nearly to my knees in the front yard. The spinach and chard are pleasantly coming up along the front walk and beans are poking out of their soggy containers on the porch. I may not have gotten the garden in this week or even begun building the coop, but my daughter is crashed out on the couch, happy and exhausted, and food's beginning to grow around here after all these weeks of waiting. I'd say that makes for a pretty good week of vacation.
For what this trip cost us, I probably should have taken advantage of the fact that everyone else at the water park had love handles too, tossed aside my insecurities and jumped into the fun with wild abandon. I'm grateful my kid had a memorable tenth birthday, but I think I'll stick with playing in the dirt though and see how that goes. Sometimes you gotta throw out the list and just let life happen.
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