A Family of Five Vacation

22 Sep A Family of Five Vacation

We wanted to visit our Wisconsin family last month.
We hadn’t visited since
Thanksgiving
of 2014.
You know, I was miserable pregnant, then had an infant, and all of a sudden, it was almost a year later.
Whoops.
Thankfully, they’ve been so kind to come to visit us many times!

We decided to take a whole day to get there. Find fun places to stop and play on the way. Stay the night with former Warsaw friends before heading all the way to James’ folks’ house. But the husband’s grandma passed away in the meantime, so plans changed. And they changed into something quite wonderful indeed! We’ve never stayed in a hotel just as our family. When we’ve traveled with my family, they’ve allowed us to share their rooms, but this was just us! Since our route changed as well, we decided our fun stop would be…Legoland in Schaumburg! James was thrilled to finally have an excuse to get in (there’s one designated hour+ per week for adults to come play with Legos without be required to have children with them). Liddi was a peach. Slept in the stroller with a blanket slung over it. Corban and Jaeda loved the rides, life-sized Lego animals and people, and making new Lego creations around every corner.

The challenge for the day was to make a robot.
This guy’s perty cute.

I promise I didn’t push Jaeda out of the way to finish my castle (complete
with cascading roof structure). I was totally just letting her do her thing.

James has a file folder on our computer
of pictures of me whistling. I’m addicted.

We stayed at the Embassy Suites that night (and had such a terrifying swimming experience that C & J are now taking swim lessons–swimming with three non-swimmers is not swimming at all!). It was great to have a main living area and a bedroom with a door, so that the babes could be sleeping and we could still be up. They had a snack time for the after-supper crowd and a beautifully filling hot breakfast the next morning. While it’s not something we can do very often, it was so worth the time and money to be just us for a bit.

On to Wisconsin!

C & J played Legos every moment they could (they’re the BEST at playing and imagining and creating stories). My contribution to their story success is always building them a house. Jaeda inspired me by putting all the doors together in a line, so I called it a lake house. I happened to create a little nook just for interest, and they promptly turned it into the bathroom. Accidentally perfect.

There’s a fun free outdoor play area with petting zoo and all.
Enjoyed a morning there.

The next day we spent a little time at the free zoo (all the animals were inside; apparently they were smarter than we were–HOT DAY) with some of James’ high school friends and their wee one. And our last night, James’ folks sweetly offered us a date night. We decided to go…swimming! James had gotten the bug and was bored of the kiddie pool. We dove dozens of times (James was the biggest hit since Fireflies with the gaping-jawed 9-year-olds), swam a couple laps (ouch), and practiced floating, which reminds us of surrendering to God’s love (and was a big takeaway from the book I finished while we were here).

The trip home was mostly straight through just with stops to eat and stretch. It was great until the last 90 minutes when I started to cry, “ARE WE THERE YET?!” Otherwise, all was well.