Friday: the Gathering Place and Olympics

As with all days, it started out with mini muffins.  Mini-muffins are a special treat to these vacations and the boys were so excited for them.

Today we went to an awesome, gigantic playground.  (Isaac rated it 17/10, so I'm not really sure there is any reason to continue our playground tour in Holland...)

On the way we saw our first Native American license plate.  I hadn't even realized they were a thing, although it does make sense.

We got to the playground and the first section was this massive castle structure.  It had four different tours, all connected by bridges.  Joshua brought me to the top of the tallest one, then down to its bridge, and then found a "secret passage".  So he climbed the secret passage and told me he'd meet me at the top.  So I went back up the four stories to meet him at the top.  He told me it was for my exercise, which I agreed with.

We stayed here a bit, but not all that long.  It was hot, so we wanted to keep moving a bit.

Then to the splash pad for a short time.

Then the water play area was open, so we all went over there.  There were pumps, dams, rivers, rocks, and it was rather amazing.  The other wonderful thing was that it all worked.  Again, we didn't stay super long because it was hot and we had other things to do, but the boys probably could have spent the whole day at the park no problem.

When we came home the boys were still in their swim suits and I was a ball of sweat, so we all jumped into the pool for a quick cool down.

After a significant rest time, we had some Olympics.  After a torch ceremony, the events included jumping off the diving board, silliest jump off the board, fastest swim across and back (the short way) and basketball.  We then had slip-n-slide, three-legged race, sack race, disc throw, and limbo.  Joshua won the limbo and he was so excited.

Award ceremony!  We can't have Olympics without medals.  Everyone got four, but they were all so proud to go up and get them.

We had some Japanese food for dinner and watched a sped-up version of the opening ceremonies.  The children were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted, but after a movie (ending at 10:45) Joshua completely crashed.  Isaac stayed up to play a game, but went to sleep right after that...at the same time and Ben and me.