Great Wolf Lodge

The kids and I left for Great Wolf Lodge yesterday during a torrential downpour. I was very proud of Ben, who talked calmly to Rebecca during the at-times-harrowing drive, reassuring her. Rebecca hates going through the car wash, and driving to Great Wolf Lodge during this rain storm was at times exactly like driving through a car wash. For 35 minutes, at high speeds.

Once we got there it was a bit tricky logistically, since we had to unload the car and get our bags up to our room, with me being the only adult to shepherd the kids and lug the bags since Joel was meeting us there after he finished at work. Once again Ben stepped up and helped as best he could with the bags and holding Rebecca's hand for me. Way to go Ben! What a mature little man he's becoming.

Great Wolf Lodge was huge, and all decked out for Christmas with trees and lights and a snow show in the lobby at 8pm followed by story time (the "snow" was actually little soap bubbles but that didn't stop Ben from trying to catch them on his tongue).

Joel met us at the water park about an hour after we got there, which was good because Ben wanted to go on all the water slides and I couldn't take him because of Rebecca. Joel went on a bunch of slides with Ben and then we "switched" and Joel stayed with Becca at the wave pool and the little kid splash park area, and I went on the slides with Ben. They have some really big, like four story, water slides that you go down on a raft or two person inner tube. It always seemed to end up that I would be the one going down facing backwards around all the twists and turns, which delighted Ben to no end and made mommy dizzy!! There was one slide called the "tornado" that we weren't brave enough to attempt but we did most of the other ones multiple times. The best thing about it was that there weren't really any lines, or only very short lines, to get on the slides. So we got a lot of sliding done.

After the afternoon in the water park, we were all hungry (climbing up and down the stairs for the slides was quite a workout) so we got changed and went to one of the Lodge's several restaurants for dinner. The kids were STARVING and since they had a kid's buffet we wasted no time in filling their plates so they could start eating. We didn't care that by the time we got our food, they were almost done. We just went back up to the kid's buffet and filled two bowls with Fruit Loops and the kids were quite happy to munch on fruit loops and watch what was going on in the water park below through the big windows in the restaurant.

Dinner was followed by about an hour and a half in the arcade, where Ben and Joel played a lot of games and Rebecca climbed on and off the seats of a lot of games, and then seemed to find her "calling", which is inserting tokens into the slots for the games. She followed Joel around begging for tokens and then would sit down on the floor to carefully insert them into whatever game Joel and Ben decided to play.

Following the arcade we went to the lobby for the aforementioned snow show, and then headed up to our room. Joel left at that point because he was on call and we were all sharing one room so his pager going off in the night would have woken everyone up. Becca was pretty keyed up so getting her to fall asleep was challenging; I ended up having to leave the TV on for her softly and it took about an hour before all of a sudden I heard her snoring very loudly. Ben, from his bed, piped up "Mom I think she's asleep now - you can turn off the TV!"

This morning we had breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts followed by some more time in the water park, though without Joel it was not so fun for Ben, since I wouldn't let him do the slides by himself even though when we entered, the attendant on duty pronounced him tall enough to be allowed in all areas of the park. I said, "No he's not, he's only five!" She seemed to think I was joking because after a moment she asked, "Is he really five?" Ben contented himself with playing in the wave pool but after an hour or two he came over to me and announced, "Mom, this was really fun but I think I am ready to go home and play Lego Star Wars [one of his video games] now."

So we did.

All in all we had a great time, and I would definitely like to come back again though next time with Joel for the whole time, and maybe to stay for two nights instead of one. There were a lot of things we didn't get to try, such as a high-tech scavenger hunt called MagiQuest where you get a "magic" wand and then have to find "magic" objects all over the Lodge to accumulate points. There were kids running all over with magic wands pointing them at pictures and statues, and if they were magic ones they'd light up and speak a message or something when the wand was pointed at them. At one point we were sitting in the lobby eating our breakfast this morning and we happened to be next to an ordinary-looking carved wolf statue and a kid ran up and pointed his wand at it and it starting talking - Rebecca nearly jumped out of her skin. "Who saying that? Who saying that?" she kept asking. Ben would have loved to do the scavenger hunt but we didn't end up having time.

Pictures below, though not so many of the water park as I would have liked since I was more occupied with making sure my kids didn't drown ;)