We had a fantastic week-before-the-4th. We took a trip to Great Wolf Lodge, which I HIGHLY recommend as a family vacation. We made the trip with 3 other families and we all had a fantastic time. The place is a hotel/resort/water park. It does have some outdoor pools and slides, but most of it is indoors so it's open year-round. And while the water attractions (pools, slides, lazy river, gigantic fort with a 1,000 gallon bucket that dumps water every so often) are incredible, there is so much more. There's an arcade, a teen lounge with video games, story time in pajamas in front of the huge great room fireplace at night, and a fun game with magic wands that open chests and light up paintings all over the hotel. It was fun and will be even MORE fun when Miss I-Am-Not-Afraid-Of-Anything-And-Do-Not-Hold-My-Hand-In-the-Pool-Because-I-Can-Swim-ALL-BY-MYSELF (no she can't) is a little older.

After Great Wolf Lodge, we headed to Austin for a few days at a lake house with my in-laws. If they'd allowed me to, I would still be standing at the back window staring at the scenery. The Hill Country is so beautiful. The weather was relatively cool, we rented jet skis one day, swam in the lake lots and spent a lot of time relaxing. It was a welcome change from the routine.

It's always hard to come back to reality after a great vacation, but we've managed to have fun amidst sitting around sulking about not living at a water park or in a lake house with a phenomenal view. Yesterday, I set up an obstacle course for the kids in the living room. Such a simple thing, but I don't do things like that for them nearly enough. Much giggling ensued as they crawled through a tunnel, knocked down big cardboard blocks with a ball, jumped over (on in my daughter's case, tried not to fall over) "hurdles," and mostly jumped into a huge pile of pillows. Truth be told, they would have had just as much fun just jumping into the pillows over and over.

Today we took a trip to Barnes and Noble. We have tried a new chores/rewards method with my son which is working well. He has a small glass bowl and a plastic bag full of arts and crafts pom poms. He has a list of responsibilities, each earning different numbers of pom poms. When he does something on the list, he checks to see how many pom poms he gets and puts the correct number into the bowl. When the bowl fills up, he gets to choose a reward. Today he chose a trip to B&N to play with their train table (which is SO much better than his train table) and pick out a new train (Annie and Clarabel). Ok, ok. It's a reach. It's not as cool and using a magic wand to open treasure chests or riding a jet ski down the Colorado River. But he was having fun, she was having fun and so I had fun.