A few new memories

You know how sometimes you're holding one of your kids and then you put it down and forget you were holding it and a little while later you're like "why is there poop on my arm?"

Recounting vacation before a cup of coffee:
So we just got back from as much of a vacation as you can take with a 7, 5, 3, and 1 year old.  Ellie asked me 9 times in 2 hours if we were almost there and said "this is the second most bored I've ever been in my whole life".  We spent Sunday and Monday nights at Great Wolf Lodge, which is a nice place to go if you don't care if your kids get stolen or drown in recycled bathtub water.  There's plenty of room on the floor for kids to puke, and your admission comes with a you'll-see-at-least-14-fat-people's-butt-cracks-or-your-money-back guarantee.  Tuesday, we went to Kelley's Island and got ice cream, played putt putt, and ate dinner (you know, things that we couldn't have possibly done save for the fact that we spent $70 to be surrounded by seagulls and polluted water).  And Wednesday, we spent 6 hours walking around in the sun from one giant animal toilet to the next, listening to and reading left-wing propaganda about deforestation and poaching kangaroos.  Walker hated it, Ellie loved it, Anderson tolerated it, and Caroline basically stared at people's butts all day, I guess.  We topped all that off with an Indians game, where Caroline got a cup of beer spilled on her right before she peed all over Carla, where Anderson kept kicking the guy in front of us until he left, where Ellie sat and colored and asked who we were playing in the 4th inning, where I fought off a migraine, and where a fat guy sat beside/on me the whole time.

Recounting vacation after a cup of coffee:
So we left Sunday morning for vacation, stopping at Cracker Barrel on the way (that's right, vacation from Jesus, too).  We all ate 'till we were stuffed full of eggs, french toast, bacon, sausage, biscuits, and greeits, then we headed out to Great Wolf Lodge, where we spent Sunday and Monday nights.  That place is really nice for little kids.  There are a bunch of giant, twisty water slides that almost everyone can go on, even Anderson.  He loved them, by the way, even the pitch-black tunnel ones.  There's a swimming pool/basketball court, a water/tree house thing, a baby pool with a couple of "weesides" for Gracie, a boring lazy river, and a "warmtub" that whole families are allowed to use.  There's story time for the kids every night in front of an animatronic forest thing (which Walker hated, Ellie loved, Anderson tolerated, and Caroline slept through, I think), and there's a pretty good (but expensive) breakfast buffet, where the wait staff just keeps bringing you food.  There's also an arcade area where we earned enough tickets (122) for a few handfuls of tootsie rolls.  We were only 16,878 tickets away from earning a Wii. 

Tuesday, we took the Jet Express, which the kids really enjoyed, from Sandusky to Kelley's Island.  Ellie especially liked it when we sat outside on the top deck so she could "see the views".  We rented a golf cart on the island, which was really nice.  Carla rode on the back with Walker, Anderson, and Caroline for the grand tour.  All three of those kids fell asleep on top of Carla while Ellie stayed wide eyed up front with me.  We visited the glacial grooves, which we decided Curious George would have loved because it looked like a giant bowling alley.  Then we played putt putt and went to dinner at the Kelley's Island brewery where we got great local perch and great local beer.  We made it back just in time to catch the Jet express back to the mainland and then drive to Cleveland.

Wednesday, we went to the Cleveland zoo and walked pretty much the whole thing.  We were there for a long time and saw just about everything.  Walker was the only one who really had a rough time.  He's not terribly interested in animals so he mainly complained about walking.  Ellie, on the other hand, could have run from one exhibit to the other for another couple hours.  She loved seeing all the different animals.  Finally, we went to the Tribe game, where we saw them crush the Tigers, where Jason Kipnis went 5-for-5 with a home run, where we got ice cream, saw Slider like 2 rows away from us, got to watch the car shoot T-shirts our way, and even got Gracie a cute little Indians cheer-leader outfit ('cause she peed all over Carla).  Best of all, I'll be the only one who remembers the horrible traffic/construction on the way home.

The moral of the story - Coffee makes everything better.