Christmas Getaway

First of all, IT SNOWED!!  I was thinking it probably would never snow around here, we always seem to be just out of the range of wherever it is snowing...But it snowed the other day, and Ingrid was so excited!  We had to go out and play in it while Otis slept.

When Otis woke up, he wanted to join in the fun, so we made a snowman.  I have no idea why Otis is pouting here, though!

Anyway, the snow was the perfect backdrop for our Christmas getaway.  Brendan had some vacation time left so we got a suite at a hotel about an hour north of here.  It was awesome!  They have a waterpark so we got to go swimming and the kids went down little water slides.  The place was all decked out for the holidays,  it was gorgeous!

 Our room had a little bunk house for the kids, with bunk beds and a boat-shaped bed.  They loved it!  I loved the fireplace!  We had such a good time, it was really relaxing and fun.  We went to the local children's museum one day and had the place to ourselves.  It was super fun, so much to explore and play with!  Ingrid loved the grocery store and the doctor's office, which always makes me laugh.  "Come play store with me, Mama."  Uh, no thanks, I actually have to do real grocery shopping every damn week--it's not that fun.  They had a cool net thing to walk out over the whole first floor.  Ingrid was a scaredy cat but Otis ran full speed onto it!

 We stayed for two nights and it was perfect.  Just enough time to go swimming, eat out a couple times, and best of all, the last night we were there, guess who showed up??

Ingrid was beyond excited.  The cool thing was they had a group of carolers on the balcony singing holiday songs for awhile before Santa showed up.  We just sat in the lobby dancing to music, then went up to put pjs on and when we came back down, there he was!  Otis was more into Mrs. Claus, the little flirt!

We had a great time, this is definitely going to have to become one of our holiday traditions!

 

Dressing Up!

Yesterday we braved the children's museum for what I thought was going to be a fun time of trick or treating, Halloween fun.  They advertised this thing like crazy, so I thought for sure it would be awesome!  Trick or treat stations!  Fall crafts!  Yay!

So even though we all have colds and I had to shove a full box of tissue in my purse, we dressed up and went.  Otis in his giraffe costume:

And Ingrid as Little Red Riding Hood.

We got there and there were dressed up workers signing people in, giving them fliers and bags for their treats.  I was so excited!  How fun for Ingrid!  Then we went upstairs to the museum, where there were four thousand kids running around because it was a day off school.  It seemed like every mom had a double stroller that they conveniently left completely in the way (empty strollers just there to carry all their junk.  I HATE THAT!!)  I searched for the trick or treat stations.  Nothing.  As we walked around I saw a big basket of Smarties.  Just sitting there.  No one near it.  Was this a trick or treat station?  Apparently so.  And there were a whopping TWO of them.  TWO!  In the whole effing children's museum, there were two trick or treat stations.  My goodness, how overwhelmingly fun...

Luckily Ingrid didn't care.  She just likes the museum so much she was having fun playing with everything and forgot about the Halloween part of it anyway.  And tonight is trick or treating in our neighborhood, where they close off the street on our block and we can partay and trick or treat for real.  Yay!