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.

Wednesday: minecraft stop motion

Isaac made this stop motion shortly after we got back from our vacation.

In other news, it was a rather boring day.  Especially for Joshua.  While he disagrees with me, I think he purposefully chose to be bored instead of cleaning the kitchen.  I finally gave him a small bribe to get him to finish up the dishwasher.  It was a pretty cool day, which was surprising after such a hot days recently.  The air quality was also fine, so we had the sliders open all day.

Ben and I went out for dinner, which was lovely and the highlight of my day.

Tuesday: blueberries

 We picked blueberries yesterday.  One child was not excited at all, but then the picking was pretty good so they kept wanting five more minutes.

(He looks taller than me, but isn't yet.  I think he's a little bit forward to change the perspective.)

(How tall Isaac is getting is very obvious, but Joshua has grown a bunch taller too.)

Today was pretty normal, really.  Isaac and I went rock climbing.  Isaac finished some painting on his clay projects.  We did some work.  We played a game in the evening.

Every room in the house is a mess right now and it's driving me a bit nuts.  That being said, there are a bunch of active projects and the mess makes sense.

Sunday: breaking Isaac

Ben, Isaac, and I played a quick game of Can't Stop this evening.  It really was fast, because I won 3-0-0.  The rule in our house is that the winner has to put the game away.  When I lose I often feel better because of this rule and when I win I'm still happy because I won.

Anyway.

Because I won so well, Isaac was trying to figure out a new rule that basically said if you skunk everyone else you should also have to clean up the game by yourself.  The conversation went something like this.

Isaac: "If you win, you win." *Thinking*

Ben and I look at each other and burst out laughing.  "Oh phew.  If you win then you win."

This set Isaac off into spurts of laughter, but he made a valiant attempt to continue.

Isaac: "If the players have zero points, then they don't have any points."

Ben and I again: "Thanks for the clarification.  This is enlightening."

Isaac, barely able to talk at this point: "No, if all the players who didn't win have zero points then the player who won..."

Ben: "The winner has one point.  I don't think you understand the game."

Isaac gave up, laughing uncontrollably.

vacation Tuesday (June 9) part 1: LEGO house

Today's big activity was to return to LEGO house.  After seeing and doing several things yesterday I wasn't sure if we would stay all six hours that it was open but it was a foolish worry and we easily stayed the whole time.

After another delicious breakfast we moved hotels...to one a five minute walk away.  I know that one of our Japan lessons was to not move hotels as often and we really didn't.  However, this was the LEGO castle hotel and 1) it's fun and 2) the deal we got included tickets to Legoland for the next day.  We were also able to sleep five in a room and while it wasn't a ton cheaper because of that, it was a little cheaper.  On our way over to the hotel I once again grabbed Ben's suitcase instead of own.  I haven't mentioned it yet but throughout the airport I kept grabbing Ben's suitcase instead of mine.  His is a dark blue while mine is a light blue, but for some reason I kept seeing only "blue" and grabbing the wrong one.  Joshua got in on it a bit and switched them on purpose a few times, but I genuinely did it on accident.  I'm sure Ben noticed right away because 1) it was the wrong color and 2) his travels in a straighter line than mine.

We dropped off our luggage and went to LEGO house.  This statue was on our walk, although we didn't go up close to it.  The playline on the way to the LEGO house from this direction was SO much better!  When we walked the other way around the loop most of it was just a straight line on the edge of the sidewalk.  On this part of the loop it actually had interesting features.

We got there a little early so that Ben could deal with shipping the sets we had purchased the day before.  The kids and I went up the yellow stairs.  Well, when it isn't too late there is a door at the top of the yellow stairs that you can go through. (We saw it on the blue stairs the day before, but it was closed.)  So we went up another set up steps.  

Then another.  

And another.  And we made it to the top!  It looks like a LEGO brick, obviously.

Then we went down the blue side.  It started raining.  It had been heavily misting earlier, but it was actual rain at this point.  There's not much one can do at the top of a building, so we just went all the way down.  We weren't soaked and dried off pretty quickly.

Isaac...did something while Joshua made a castle with the large bricks while we waited for Ben and Cheryl and for the main area to open.  Then Joshua noticed kids nearby making the word LEGO and looking for blue bricks, so he helped them find some.  To me, this is one of the core teachings of Lego...learning through play.  In this instance, it was specifically collaboration.

There were a few main places we wanted to get to before the main crowd showed up, so we flitted around a bit.  It isn't a super large place, so this wasn't an issue.  We started with the bee robots.  (This used to be ice robots.)  Each person had a robot that could plant seeds, water the seeds, or get water from a puddle.  When the flowers had bloomed, the bees would collect pollen to make honey.  It was rather Robot Turtles like.  "Go forward three units.  Plant seeds.  Turn."  "Go forward one unit, get water.  Turn 180, go forward one unit, water plants."  You could make your instructions as long or short as you wanted to.  Our results were all pretty similar, although Ben got the most total items.  Some of us got more honey, some planted more flowers.

We made stop motion movies next.  I really like mine, although I made it super short and the rest of the family didn't understand it at first.  Isaac and Cheryl mostly finished theirs, while Ben and Joshua (who were working together) needed another minute so theirs cut off a bit early.  All the videos start around ten seconds - there's a lot of pre-video credits.  Information about the stories is below the videos.

Amanda:

Ben and Joshua:

Isaac:

Amanda: A woman with scissors approaches another woman, who is very scared.  The first woman acts scary but ends up just cutting the second woman's hair.  The woman loves the haircut.

Ben and Joshua: The woman dives off a dock and finds treasure.  The pirate sees the treasure and chases the first woman.  The first woman opens a secret door to escape, drinks a potion from a silver goblet and can fly.  Not shown is how she also has fire power now to defend herself.

Isaac: A policeman chases a pirate, catches him and puts him in handcuffs.  The policeman uses his wand to poof a boat into existence.  (It looks like an explosion, but that was the only special effect that was close to poofing-in.)