Friday: normal summer

It was a pretty normal summer day.  Isaac had managed to get into a Blender class at the library yesterday and it was a two day class, so he did that in the afternoon.  

We played some games, did some chores, and stuff like that.  Isaac and I went rock climbing and Ben went e-Foiling.

vacation Wednesday, part 1 (June 10): Legoland

Today's activity was Legoland!  Once again, and based on other Legoland parks, we weren't sure we'd end up staying the whole day but we absolutely did.  We enjoyed the early entry half hour and left with about a minute to spare.

We ate breakfast at the hotel.  The food was again excellent.  Ben was able to continue his streak of having a soft boiled egg, I had bread and cheese, but there were still the normal breakfast foods too.

Outside our door:

Going to the other building for breakfast:

We walked through the other LEGO hotel on the way to the park.  It had many cool sculptures and we found a lot of favorite animals.

The early entry didn't apply to very many things.  We were able to walk around mini land, but we enjoyed that.  We saw several places that we expected to see in the near future, and there was a really nice replica of Fehmarn.  While I had never heard of this, it is the largest construction site in Northern Europe.  There is a tunnel factory and then the tunnel piece is floated over to the right spot and sunk in the water...and the exhibit showed several of these parts moving around and sinking.

Now you can see where we went yesterday on our roof adventures: up the yellow steps, through the French fries and rocket ship (although I'm not sure if I included any of those pictures), on the roof, down to the submarine, on the surfboards, and down blue stairs.)

Ben had done his amazing thing and figured out the rides we should go on first.  In the end, it didn't matter because the park wasn't very busy and we never had to wait more than two cycles for a ride.  But one never knows, so it's good to have a plan.

We went to the speedway battling coasters first!  It was nice and smooth and pretty fast.  They let us switch from one coaster to the other without having to go through the whole line too!

Then the dragon coaster.  It was not as exciting as I expected.  There was fun stuff to look at while the ride was starting (castle-type stuff with dragons and ogres) but then the roller coaster part was all of about twenty seconds.  We were able to go on this one twice too, so I took some pictures the second time.

Then the polar expedition.  This was my favorite!  It was pretty fast and then it stopped and we watched an animation.  I expected that to be the end of the ride, so imagine my surprise when the whole coaster dropped a few feet.  It was probably an even smaller drop, but since I wasn't expecting it at all it was great fun.  (Ben and a child often rode in the front of the coasters, especially since the lines were so short.  This is one time that it didn't work out as well for them because they could see the track.)  We went on this at least three times, but not three times in a row.

After this it rained a bit.  We went to the Emmitt's couch ride, which is inside and kind of like Soarin'.  We didn't have the best of seats, but it is still a fun ride and got us out of the rain.  (It wasn't quite raining enough to get our rain coats out, but it was getting close.  There was the tiniest of overhangs to stand under while we waited to get on the ride, and that was enough.)  While waiting, it was rainy and sunny at the same time.  The weather was actually quite crazy and it kept trying to rain throughout the morning but then stopping enough.  I said something about the fact that there should be a rainbow somewhere and Ben said "I see a rainbow."  He was talking about the permanent rainbow on the ride across the street.

It was sunny again by the time we got out, so three of us decided to do the ride across the street.  It ended up being a ton more fun than I was expecting.  I was expecting a somewhat bouncy ride, but the ups and downs were just right.  Enough to be fun, not enough to feel yucky.  While we were on the ride Cheryl had apparently told Ben something like, "Keep an eye on my purse" and so they gave it a mini-photo shoot.

Thursday: fire hydrant gaslighting

Yesterday I noticed a fire hydrant in our neighbor's yard was white.  "Hmm," I thought, "It used to be yellow, right?"

Today I had a bunch of errands to do by Lowes, which is just slightly east of us.  All the fire hydrants were now white.  "Hmm," I thought, "they used to be yellow, right?"

Then I brought Joshua to a friend's house and going down the major road near our house, but to the west, I mentioned it to Joshua.  "Look at the fire hydrants.  They're all white.  I remember them being yellow."  Joshua agreed with me.  

Finally, after a turn and going a bit farther down the road they turned back to yellow.  We decided that they used to be yellow and we weren't losing our minds.

Oh!  I just looked it up.  It's probably just a primer and they'll turn yellow again soon.  Just to mess with me a little more.

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.