This past Saturday I woke up not planning to go anywhere or do much of anything other than some laundry, lesson plans, and cleaning the house...none of which sounded like much fun. It was just the 3 kids and me at home since Nathan was working at the station. So, I decided to text my mother in-law and see what she was up to. My husband's parents live about 1.5 hours from us which is a perfect drive for a quick day trip or a short weekend stay. She (Kelly) said that her and my father in-law (Ray) didn't really have any plans for the day and asked if we wanted to join them at an in-door water park at a military base near their house. Of course the boys thought that was a fantastic idea!
I quickly cleaned up the breakfast dishes, packed up towels, swimsuits, changes of clothes, diapers, wipes, lunch, snacks, drinks, toys... and the list goes on! Seriously, traveling with kids even for a day trip requires a lot of stuff. But I think I did pretty well getting everything together on such short notice. We only left about 20 minutes later than I had planned. And we only got stuck in traffic for about 25 minutes so we made it there in pretty good time.
The in-door pool was in the Aquatic Center on the base. They only charged us $3 a person to get in! It was such a fun little pool/water park. They had a huge slide, a whirlpool/lazy river, and a kid pool with a mushroom. The kids all loved it! Ruy loved the slide and Liam loved the mushroom. Alanna loves water. She stood at the side of the pool and played with a little toy boat or splashed the water the whole time.
We stayed about 3 hours and then headed to a little park to let the kids play. Once we got out of the van, Liam ran into the grass and pulled down his pants and underwear and just stood there. "Um, Liam...what are you doing?" "I need to go poop Mommy!" "Baby there isn't a toilet here and you can't just poop in the middle of the playground field." That was an interesting conversation I had with Liam! And it was a pretty funny sight seeing him strip down in the middle of that field! I asked him if he could wait a little bit until we went to dinner. He said he could but then he just stood there looking at the playground instead of playing. Then he came over to me and bent over saying how bad his belly hurt. I knew at this point he really had to go. Him not wanting to play meant he really was hurting. We headed back to the Aquatic Center but he didn't go. So we headed to dinner. We had a yummy dinner at Moe's and after two more potty attempts during dinner....we finally solved Liam's issue! :) Poor little guy. It's hard being three.
After dinner we loaded up in the van. It was such a beautiful night. We rolled down the windows, turned on Patch the Pirate, and headed home. We got home at bedtime so I just put the kids in pjs, brushed their teeth, and tucked them in. They all crashed pretty fast. It was a really wonderful day. I'm glad I decided to give up spending the day at home cleaning and doing laundry.
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