Great Wolf Lodge

Annika in the Cub Club @ Great Wolf Lodge

Just finished painting her dolphin magnet.

Goofing around at the Cub Club...

Josiah, at work on his latest masterpiece (in case you can't tell, it's Mario)!

The kids' "cabin" inside our suite...typical Annika with her tongue out, Will is a blur!

We had a good mini-vacation at the Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg. Arrived Friday night in time for buffet supper. The kids expressed some wonderment that "buffet" means, loosely tranlated: eat until you fall over. We let them go ahead and fill their own plates, go back for seconds, and make deserts that were meant to contain ice cream but mostly contained M&Ms. They begged us to go back to the buffet for every meal afterwards, but at $70/meal, that just wasn't going to happen. It didn't matter how much we ate, it was nowhere close to $70 worth. But it was fun for just that evening.

As you can see, we had quite the charming little suite. The kids had an area like a little log cabin (sadly, without a little log cabin DOOR that we could shut at night). There were bunk beds and a third twin bed in there. This is the first time we've gone to a hotel with William and not brought a bed for him with us...he did OK. We're not going to dump the pack-n-play just yet. They had their own little TV in there and we brought along the Wii for any downtime. Hans and I had a lovely comfy bed in the main area and a fireplace and a little balcony overlooking the heating plant. Not quite the same views as we used to get at Edelweiss...

Spent time in the pools on Friday and Saturday. Half the day on Saturday, feels like. The great thing about the GWL is that they have lifeguards. All over the place. Like, ninja lifeguards hiding up in the fake trees and behind the fake rocks. It felt safe to let Josiah and Annika loose on the place, which was fantastic. I told them "Do NOT leave this pool area with anyone but Mommy or Daddy" and then shooed them off to play and didn't see them again for entire chunks of time. They had a blast. There was a zero entry pool for William with miniature water slides. There were hot pools, a wave pool, an enormous "fort" structure that had bigger water slides and all sorts of climbing areas, an area to play water sports, a lazy rafting area and then, the big slides...the mother of which was "The Howlin' Tornado". Josiah went on it three times, with coercion at least one of those times. I tried it once and it was...interesting. I got the spot facing backwards in the raft, so I couldn't tell what was heading my way.

Anyway, there are no pool pictures I'm afraid as the mere thought of water near our phones or other electronics (after the toilet incident last week) fills us with dread. Suffice to say, we had an excellent time at the pool and everyone was in the water long enough to become pruney, exhausted and get that feeling--drifting off to sleep--of the water moving your body. You know what I mean?

We tried to go to Busch Gardens to see their light display on Saturday evening, but they were so busy, they were actually closed! So--no go on that. Instead we had supper at a restaurant called "Jungle Jim's" that was so horrifying I can't even talk about it now. I have had two-year-olds before, I wonder why Will's behavior is so shocking to me!? There was just a lot of drama, lots of fits being pitched, lots of spilled milk and crying over it, lots of fussyness, lots of mama crawling under the table to retrieve things and getting red-faced in the process. Lots of people staring at my menagerie.

Well, at the end of the day, I still love each and every one of them. From the biggest animal to the littlest...!