vacation Tuesday (June 9) part 3: LEGO house

Lunch was next since we were nearby and it was lunchtime.  This time we just got a few smaller items from the cafe.  However, we saw one of the other group members getting their lunch just as we were starting ours, so we invited her to sit with us.  Again, connections are nice.

We walked around the tree on the way to the blue racing room.  The tree is a fun mixture of tree and different LEGO themes with monkeys.  However, it is a bit hard to photograph well. 

We spent a little bit of time in the upstairs showcase room again and got a few more pictures.  

There is a mosaic maker and I thought this was a really cute picture of Cheryl.

The dinos are all roaring because they're stepping on LEGO bricks.

When we got to the racing room, we found that it was reserved for another half hour.  Although it was disappointing, we moved to the green room.  This room was probably my least favorite of all the rooms.  It wasn't busy, which was super nice, but it didn't quite work for me.  Everyone was given a goal with four criteria in order to build a better item for a city.  So, for example, a vehicle that is creative, uses renewable energy, and has bananas.  (Now, we were told the day before that the last item was usually an easy item so that small children could participate with the build too.  I think that is a cool idea.)  However, you couldn't get a different selection of items, there weren't many wheels, and how does one build something that isn't creative?  (Especially when you have limited pieces?)  We did have a nice time building all together as a group as we looked for the bananas or wheels, but it wasn't quite there.  It was almost there, but I thought it needed to be tweaked just a little bit.

More giraffes!  We always get a picture taken with our favorite animal.

Here was my building prompt from above.

When you were done building, the creation would be scanned and you could record a statement about it.  I'm not sure what they're doing with the recordings as they didn't show up in our LEGO house account.

This is a poor image of my first prompt.  It is a vehicle, and the wheels are trash cans (remember the lack of wheels?).  It is creative because it is a rainbow.  Beats me on how it uses renewable energy, but there isn't a gas engine so obviously it does.  There are bananas for everyone to eat while riding.

This was my second one.  I don't remember my prompt, but probably something like "a building that is happy, uses renewable energy, and has flowers."  The scan wasn't that good, so I didn't include it.

This was Isaac's prompt: a creative vehicle that is wind powered and has wheels.  I like this one because he used steering wheels as the wheels, again due to the lack of wheels.  (They had some wheels.  Finding four matching ones would have been possible but more time than we wanted to spend.)

Joshua had a building that is friendly to animals and you can see?  The last part was eyes, and I don't remember what that stood for.

Ben had a building that was a place for community, friendly to animals, and had bananas.

By the time we finished this, the racing room was back open.  It was busy!!  Some of the kids weren't very good at waiting in line, which made it a little annoying too, but we got a few races in.  There was a race (with four cars) and a jump through the circle.  I got mine through the circle, and I think it was on the first try!

This was the circle jump.  You can see a part of the circle in the bottom left hand side.

One challenge we made for ourselves was to build a car with one wheel.  Isaac's and Joshua's made it to the finish line, but Ben and mine got caught on the starting line.

One of the last things we did was the fish.  It was new last time we were here and I remember it working a little bit better.  It was similar to Chef Mini in that you build a flat creation and scan it, but then you add a face to it and it swims with the other fish.  The scanner did not work well, so most of the fish were missing pieces.  It often wasn't just one or two pieces, but sometimes a bunch.  It still worked, but when you spend time making something specific, it's nice it if would scan it properly.

We looked at mini land again for a little bit and then headed to the museum in the basement.  It was a cool museum, but we had heard most of the information the day before.  Joshua, Cheryl, and I stayed a bit looking at the different sets on display through the years while Ben and Isaac went up for the pick-a-brick.  The pieces in the bins were good pieces and we found some extra cool pieces in the miscellaneous bins too.  We also spent some time looking at the brick making machine at the end.  Everyone gets a card with a unique six-brick combination on it and can take a bag of six red bricks with which to build it.  (Assuming the build isn't too precarious.  Some of the combinations did not look sturdy.)  

Joshua waiting for his bag of bricks.  He wanted to catch it right from the outlet.

Bin of demolded bricks.  Six at a time go up the conveyor belt.  (Not shown: packaging and weighing.)

This was my card for the day.  (I had also gotten one yesterday.)  It would be a precarious build.  Ben was the only one with a good one.

Oh, Ben in his happy spot.

We found out that the LEGO bricks in the sculpture were hollow with tubes just like real bricks, so both boys tried to disappear into them.  They both did a pretty good job, but there was always a small piece of them that was visible.  We finally let the kids climb over the big bricks as much as they wanted and got some pictures, since we didn't expect that we'd be coming back this way.  It also turned out that the yellow brick was a really good slide.  Honestly, around lunch time I was wondering if there would be enough to do to spend the whole day here, but we started when it opened and didn't leave until it was closing.  Spending the day was not a problem at all.  It was about 4pm and we had seen a bakery the day before, so we stopped to get a Danish.  After demolishing that, we picked up some sandwiches for dinner.

As we were walking back, the kids were once again enjoying the playline.  At one point, Isaac was jumping through the letters..A, B, C, D, ...X, Y, Z, Æ, Ø, and Å.  Isaac completely stopped when he got to the last three...what where they doing there??  I mentally tripped...it turns out that I mentally sing the ABC song more often than I realize and when confronted with extra letters my mind said, "what what what??"

There were some nice playgrounds right outside the hotel, so the kids played on those for quite a while.  The seesaw was their favorite, and they went back to it several times over the next few days.  It was a really good seesaw - nice and big so that you could run up and down it and make it bounce well.

The kids finally came in and we realized that we didn't have information on how to open the safe in our room.  I went to the front desk (not the shortest trip ever) and she said the books should have been on their beds.  I looked a bit puzzled because the kids had been on their beds and hadn't said anything, but she gave me two books anyway.  Good thing!  We did not receive the books.  The kids went to find the code for the safe - it involved counting things in the lobby.  It took them a few tries and an ask, but they finally got the safe open...just to find it empty.  While this was an initial let down, the kids and I went to the front desk, again, and they got to pick out their own polybags.  So in the end it worked out well because they got a say in what set they got.

At this point it still felt fairly early because it was still light out, but it wasn't.  We all went to bed soon after.

Tuesday: Happy Birthday!

It's Joshua's birthday!  He's very excited because he can now take adult medicine, which more often comes in pill form.  He has hated some of the liquid medicine and it is a battle to get him to take it and keep it down.

This morning during breakfast I was working on my puzzle and both kids started working on it with me!  I usually don't catch them but they worked with me for quite a while.  We even finished the puzzle and they didn't leave me when we got to the last hard pieces.  

We went to the Holland Cat Cove with some friends to pet some cats.  Joshua loves cats, so it seemed like a nice small thing to do on his birthday.  This little grey kitten was called Olympia and she played the whole hour.  She was super cute and I expect she won't stay around for long.

His birthday cake has one candle and two candles.

Monday: wi-fi

Dad came over this morning and worked with Joshua to change all our outlets and light switches in the basement from almond to white.  It turns out that the circuit breaker is not well labeled and so we went through several incorrect circuits as we tried to find the correct ones.

This made the wi-fi go down.  It also turns out that I don't understand how all the wi-fi setup works.  Actually, this was well known and not a surprise.  However, since this was the second time it went down in two weeks Ben gave me a quick explanation of how it all worked and so now I know.  I made Isaac listen too.  Between the two of us we should be able to figure it out if Ben is at work.

Sunday: LEGO challenge

For family game time, Joshua chose a LEGO challenge.  This time we needed to secretly write a challenge for someone else and then we had an hour to build it.

Ben: received a challenge from Amanda to create a book with a moving page and a short story.  (He narrates the story in the video.)

Amanda: received a challenge from Isaac to make a piece of fruit with an accessory.  I made a raspberry with Grey Bear.  It took Isaac a while to figure out what the fruit was, partially because he was expected a life-size fruit.  Everyone figured out Grey Bear easily, but the raspberry was harder.  That being said, I thought the raspberry was a decent build.

Isaac: received a challenge from Joshua to make balloons.  He made a normal balloon, a pac-man balloon, and was working on a unicorn balloon.  A fun part of this build is that the little kid with a normal sized balloon is staring in awe at the large red balloon.

Joshua: received a challenge from Ben to make an alien invasion.  The detail that he got in this build is really cool.  The minifigs really bring the story to life.

Saturday: Cuisinart

I broke my mixer today, but I wasn't very sad about it.  I've wanted a better one for quite a while, but couldn't justify it.  I ended up with a Cuisinart brand.

I was telling this to Ben and called it a "Cuisine-art".  He said, "I don't think that's how you say it."  So it turns out is is "Cueeze-in-art" where the Cueeze rhymes with squeeze.  Apparently, I am not the only one to be offended by the pronunciation of this name.

vacation Tuesday (June 9) part 2: LEGO house

The last area we wanted to get to early was the emotion area.  (We should have also prioritized racing, but at this point it was getting busy everywhere.)  Here you build a creature, give it an emotion, and have it scanned in the machine.  Then it dances in its emotion for a minute and the previous creature comes out to dance too.  Your emotion gets passed on to the previous creature.  This worked really well and Joshua especially loved making the creatures, but it took a bit to get the creature scanned.  I'm sure there is a bunch of processing it needs to do to make it dance, but that part was "the worst" part of the area.

After making several, I realized there was a flower making spot right next to it.  I like flowers, so I went here.  The weirdest part was they had several pieces with a bar on them, but no pieces with a clip to clip onto the bar.  It was awkward until I realized this, and then I just worked with the limitation.  I made a lot of flowers.  It wasn't my favorite area, but it was up there.

We took a brief break and then found ourselves in the red zone.  Yesterday this is where we made the ducks.  Today we decided to make penguins!  We would make one penguin at each station and would have ten minutes per penguin.  Surprisingly, we stuck to the ten minutes pretty well.  When we do this at home it is often, "ten more minutes!"  The results were pretty fun.  They all are obviously penguins, but some are definitely better and worse than others.  

Yellow bricks, from left to right, Joshua, Isaac, Amanda, Ben

All color bricks, from left to right: Ben, Amanda, Joshua, Isaac.  (The yellow ones match the people, but they were moved since the previous picture.)

All colors and shapes, from left to right: Ben, Amanda, Joshua, Isaac.  I think Isaac ended up mostly doing another brick penguin, although he was using the all shapes area.  I think Joshua won with the most recognizable (probably for all three), but he even had time to make an iceberg for the last one and that added a lot of context. 

Although my last penguin wasn't the best, I really did like its stomach.

Although no one was super excited about it, we took pictures in the Duplo pool.  When will the next time we find this many Duplo?  However, it is super uncomfortable to get in and out.

It wasn't quite lunch time, so we all went on a tour of the outside of the building.  By this time we had seen several other members of yesterday's tour, which was a ton of fun.  It's really fun making connections with people when you don't really need to worry about seeing them long term.  (To be fair, it's often fun to see them long term too, but there's not as much pressure if it is just a short interaction.) It wasn't raining this time, so we were able to enjoy the mini-playgrounds a bit more.

We went up the yellow side.

Then we got some pictures at the top.

It was surprisingly bright for having so many clouds.  The kids were told to close their eyes and smile.

And then down the blue side!  There were several playground areas not shown, either because I just didn't get pictures or they were a little bit too busy.

I really like this action shot.

Well, I guess this day will have a part 3, if not a part 4!  We just made it to lunch time!

Thursday

 

A few weeks ago, my wrist hurt a fair amount...I couldn't use it to push myself up from a sitting position.  It got mostly better until this afternoon, when it started hurting again.  I don't know what triggered it, but it is rather annoying.