Summer "Adventures"

I can't believe summer is 1/2 over. I love having all the kids at home and it feels like we are more of a family again. Now if Brett could just have summer off too...... I have been telling the kids we need to have lots of fun while they are home from school. However, many days go by where we don't take advantage of this. I've also heard complaints of boredom coming from Anna and Joshua. So I had this idea to try and "twist" our daily happenings into an "adventure" by labeling it as such. For example, "1st we will _______(work in the yard, do school (not much)/clean rooms etc.) and THEN we will have our adventure on our bike ride" (which makes it sound more exciting than it is!) They are really buying into this. I love it. You know how when you tell kids things are fun/exciting they actually believe you most of the time. Sometimes I even believe it myself! The power of positive thinking or something like that.

This is working because one day I heard Joshua telling a friend, "Every day my mom takes us on fun adventures!" I'm so glad I have brainwashed him into thinking that because we really don't have that many exciting adventures - I mean, YES! We have exciting adventures EVERY DAY!!!! Ever since we started the "adventures" I have heard much less complaints of being bored - even though we haven't really changed our schedule. I think it has also made me think a little harder about what we will be doing and get a little more creative about making it fun.

I took the kids to a place called Happy Hollow, in San Jose last week. (This would fall into the category of a REAL adventure! ) We had never been and I heard that it was about to be town down, remodeled and closed for a year. So we went on the last day it was open. The kids pretty much thought it was Disneyland and the great thing about it was the tickets were only $1! However, it was about 105 degrees and so to cool off on the way home we stopped at a water/sand park. I almost said, "No" to the water park because we didn't have towels or bathing suits and I was tired, but then I remembered we were having an adventure.

It is nice because I am finally starting to feel like I can take all of the kids places by myself without Brett (and without having a nervous breakdown.)


On the dragon ride (above) there were all sorts of little buildings and miniatures in the woods. They were pretty bad (as in VERY old, broken, random and ranged from the topic of "The Three Little Pigs" to "Snow White" and then back to "The 3 Little Pigs" -probably because when the park was first built those were the only cartoons kids knew about! - and then some token poster-like drawn animals on sticks! I'm so rude - the kids liked them! But you can understand why they might be re-doing/tearing down the park)

I was taking a bunch of pictures of these things so I could show Brett later and we could laugh about it. I was having fun laughing to myself as I snapped about 26 pictures of Snow White or a dwarf because the people on the train ride sitting behind probably thought I was really impressed with the little statues to be taking so many pictures! This was one of the fancier ones. It was about 2 feet tall.



Happy Hollow also had lots of random buildings that you would just climb up to the top of. Might have a slide inside or a place at the top to wave to mom and dad. What adventures!!!

Luke was so "big" and just loved everything he saw there.

It had 2 merry-go-rounds which they did about 4 times in a row. Imagine the circuit overload if we took the kids to Disneyland. I don't know if they could handle the excitement, when Happy Hollow was this much fun for them!

Anna was a great help in keeping track of Luke.

Claire was in absolute HEAVEN feeding the animals with food she gathered off the ground because I wouldn't give her a quarter. You can't really tell from the picture, but she is bursting with happiness. Sheis our little animal lover. She is afraid of the "big pool" and won't get in it even with her float suit or someone holding her, but she'll run up to a huge dog and bury her head in it's fur.

This was Luke's absolute favorite thing. He screamed when it was time to get off. And he screamed the whole time we were in line to go again (Yes, there was a line! What do you expect when there are only 3 rides and it is $1 day?!) He went on it about 5 times. (I also put a video of him being a "cool rider" on his blog page) People hated being behind us in line - there were 10 cars and we took up 1/2 of them :) I saw Eliza slap the "conductor's" leg as she went past him. He started laughing. She can be so strange!

At the sand park back closer to home - my little drowned rats. This is a great park.







What a fun day!