Today was my birthday! The kids do such a good job being excited for me. (Ben does too, but he is excited for birthdays like I am. The kids are super excited.)
In the morning we picked up Aunt C to try a new hiking trail, and it didn't disappoint! Sanctuary Woods, which had over 170 stairs, was a beautiful place. Normally the trail would be about 3/4mi, but we took several adventure trails and went further. The claim to fame for this trail is that you can see both Lake Mac and Lake Michigan at the same time. This is true, and we found the place, but it wasn't well marked nor was it all that free of trees. It would be interesting to go during the different seasons to see what it looked like.
This is the place to see both lakes.
I've found Tornado sitting like this twice in the past two days. The first time I just laughed at him, but the second time I took a picture.
Joshua had a friend over in the afternoon. Isaac and I played a game of Dominion, and I also took a short nap and did a little work. Larry and Cheryl took me out for dinner - they were a little slow and it was a little cold, but it was also a lot of fun.
Today was the only weekend day in all of August that we were mostly not busy. So we had a screen time day. We usually have one a summer and I wasn't paying attention to the schedule well. We still went to church and went to visit Great-grandma, but otherwise the kids could have screens whenever they wanted.
Speaking of Great-Grandma, today I brought over our quills and so she and Ben could try those out. I think they were on their last legs, but they worked well enough. And we played some Uno, as normal.
We did some errands this morning. We had to delay a little bit because it was raining hard and they involved a bit of walking outside. One errand involved getting 15 foam noodles.
We met some friends for rock climbing. I also got a new route! Isaac told me I needed to trust my feet on a teeny tiny foot hold and so I did and it worked!
We (are currently) having our bi-weekly video chat with friends. We haven't talked about butter (YET!) but we have hit cheese.
We went to downtown Zeeland today to bring some games to the game store. There was a gigantic penguin, so of course we took a picture and sent it to Ben. The game store was really the only thing on the docket today, so I managed to get a few chores done too. They were boring. I briefly thought that maybe next year I should always make sure to have one mostly empty day every week, but then decided that was a bad plan - I'd rather have fun and periodically apologize about the messy house.
Two days ago we watched assorted Olympic sailing events. One of them ended up being, accidently, the wind surfing from Tokyo. There was no wind, so all of the athletes had to pump their boats to get anywhere and it was hilarious. We watched it again last night because it was so funny.
We went on a walk with Cheryl this morning. Last night Giraffe's bad part was that he didn't get to go outside, so Isaac said he could come on this morning's walk. Grey Bear is always up for leaving the house and Snowfoot jumped in on the action too.
Really, the only reason I brought the backpack was for the lovies.
We also saw 35 turtles! They were all lined up on a few logs, and I don't think I've ever seen that many before.
This afternoon Joshua said that he trapped Tornado, but I think Tornado actually trapped Joshua.
The day once again started with FlowRider lessons as Isaac really wanted to do them again and was willing to pay for his portion. He didn't have to twist Ben's arm too hard and Joshua joined too. The teachers weren't as good, but they still had some good rides. Joshua had a fun time, but a few extra pounds would have helped him out.
The park opened and we all did a few last rides. We probably spent 1-1.5 hours finishing up. We weren't in a hurry, but we didn't want to drag our feet too much either.
After changing, we went back to Tom Foolery's. The rock climbing line wasn't too long, so I did that with Isaac. Oh boy! I could tell I didn't have the right type of shoes! We raced to the top the first time and pretty much tied, but he was on a harder route. I did my route one more time and then I was good. It was fun but not as much fun as I had been expecting. We did a few other games, finished up the money on the arcade card, and went to the store. Overall, we ended up with a lot more tickets than I had been expecting. Ben carefully chose a luck game on Tuesday and some of the games gave us quite a few because they were skill based instead of luck based. We walked around a bit, but ended up with a pyramid rubrix cube and a stuffed cat in a coffee cup. Honestly, Ben and I weren't thrilled with the cat but Joshua had his heart set on it and it was the right number of tickets. (Spoiler: Catcachinno has become a beloved member of the family. Every night he tells me that his bad part was not being able to drink some drink. His good part varies a bit, but defaults to a drink that he did get to drink.)
And then we started home. We had a small (10min?) detour when my phone decided that we wanted to take the ferry, but Ben caught it quickly. Also around this time Ben noticed one of his toes starting to turn black and blue. On the Flow Rider, at some unknown point, he stubbed his toe hard. By the time we left the water park he couldn't wiggle his toes. On the way home we decided to call the phone nurse, who of course told us to go to the ER. (I'm not sure why we call the phone nurse anymore. They always tell me to come in. Also, we were going to get into town about 30 minutes after all the urgent care places closed.) Long story short, I dropped him off at the Holland ER on the way into town. They confirmed the break but were otherwise rather unhelpful. Ben went to a specialist the next day who mostly said just walk on your heel for a while. Ben doesn't have any boots or tape or anything like that, he just needs to walk carefully.
Even with the toe, it was an excellent vacation and we all really enjoyed it.
