The end of summer in a nutshell

Oct 28, 2011 15:53

Since I see that my last substantive post was about summer camp, that means I didn't even post here about our last-week-of-summer adventures! So here's a quick recap.

Back in the spring when I was signing the kids up for summer camps, I realized that none of the camps covered the last week before school started (final week of August) so I decided to take that week as vacation and figure something out. After I had put in for the vacation time and been approved, I started to get excited about the idea of taking a whole week to spend with the kids -- to do all the fun stuff around our area that I always want to do, but that we never manage to do because I'm working and I don't want to go places on weekends because I think they'll be too crowded.

Then Hurricane Irene looked like she was going to ruin our vacation week, but luckily that didn't happen. All we got from Irene was a day of rain and strong winds, not too bad, although it did eat up the two weekend days that I had planned to spend on grocery shopping and preparing. But that was no big deal.

So on the Monday of that week, we got up (me, the kids, and my mom) and went to Canobie Lake Park, an amusement park only about a half-hour's drive away. It was a beautiful day post-hurricane and we had a great time. Unexpectedly, we bumped into two of Isaac's friends there, so Isaac had a great time going on rides with them, and it was good to have another adult handy. We went on tons of rides and ate lots of junk food.

On the Tuesday, Isaac had his annual physical, so we didn't do too much that day. I think we did something fun afterward though, but I can't remember what it was. Oh! Maybe we went to the swimming pool, which we had never done in the middle of the day before. I think that was it.

Wednesday, we again got up earlyish, and drove with grandma up to New Hampshire, where we dropped off our stuff at a hotel and then went to spend the day at Water Country. It's pretty much what you can expect from the name: an amusement park full of water-related rides. There are water slides of all different kinds, a wave pool, a "lazy river," and such. Some friends of ours, a mom and a kid Ruthie's age, met us there and we had a great time. When Water Country closed for the day, we let them talk us into buying a membership for next year. The way it worked out, I could apply our entrance fee for that day to the membership, and then we basically only have to go once next year to make it pay for itself. So that was great. We had dinner at a restaurant, spent the night at the hotel, and the next day we drove around Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, Maine, where there are lots of outlet stores and I bought new shoes for the kids. Then in the afternoon, after checking out of the hotel, we went back to Water Country again. We had the memberships now, so why not? We spent another two hours there, and this time we knew which rides were our favorites so we just went on them over and over. It was great.

Then we drove home. Then on Friday we just puttered around, ran some errands, and I think that was the evening we went bowling, which was fun.

Saturday...umm, I don't remember most of what we did on Saturday, except I know that grandma took the kids on a boat ride for part of it so I could have a little alone-time to recover from all the fun. ;) On Sunday, I decided to let the kids spend the whole day watching TV. That's definitely in the category of things I never let them do, and the weather was kind of crappy that day anyway, so what the hell. They loved it, of course. They watched episode after episode of "Pinky and the Brain" and "Animaniacs"! :)

The next day was Labor Day, and we went to Monkey Joe's, which is an indoor bounce-house place. It's basically just a huge room full of different bouncy houses (big inflatable things for the kids to jump on). They have a little area for parents to hang out, with comfy chairs and TVs and internet access. So I sat and read a book for four hours while the kids played. It was kind of funny. Periodically one of them would come over and say "I'm ready to leave" and I would say "okay, go ask [other kid] if [he/she] is ready," and the other kid would say "just a few more minutes" so I would say "okay, five more minutes" and then they'd both disappear for another half-hour. :)

So that was our fun weekend of vacation! It was really awesome.

When I wrote about this on Google+, I called the post "The Power of Yes" and talked about how freeing it was for me to spend that week saying more Yes than No to the kids. (Edit: I cross-posted that essay here on LJ.) In the course of our normal lives, of course, I say No quite a lot, and after a while it starts to wear you down -- both the parent and the kids! So when we were at the amusement parks and so forth, it was so nice to just say Yes. Can I go on that ride? Yes. Can I go on that ride again? Yes. Can I have ice cream? Yes. Can we stay a few more minutes? Yes! It was lovely. At one point grandma had taken Isaac on a ride, and Ruthie and I were waiting for them to come back, and she caught sight of the caramel-apple stand, and she said "can I have a candy apple?" and I said yes. Her little face just blossomed with delight -- she had so obviously expected a No. I bought her the candy apple and, just as I had predicted inside my head, she ate about two bites and then handed it to me. I ate the rest. So, you know, it was crazy to spend $5 on that stupid thing, but worth it anyway.

Of course, then we had to go back to "real life" and back to me saying No a lot, but at least we have our memories.

things i think about, what i did today, minutiae, vacation, summer, parenting

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