Weeks 32 & 33: The fish come home

Two weeks ago, on a Monday afternoon, the kids and I drove two hours in the van, along with our good friends from down the street and their mom (yay for eight seats!) to a birthday party at an incredibly fun water place. We spent five hours at Wonderland Waterpark at Ace Adventure Resort, floating, climbing, sliding, swimming, and digging in the sand. The kids really didn't want to leave. They were all pretty adventurous with the climbing! Charlotte also loved just floating/swimming around in the lake. And of course they enjoyed lots of friends video game/movie time in the car to and from the party.

Charlotte is the happy owner of a hand-me-down pink rose cottage, currently hanging out on the deck.

I decided we should take the time to thoroughly clean the porch. Frank helped me remember how to set up and use the pressure washer. We sprayed off the chair cushions, but they were in a pretty sad state after being outside for so many years, so I replaced them. Charlotte has been spending a lot of time out front doing chalk, bubbles, and scooter, insisting on my presence most of the time, so I needed somewhere clean and non-bug-infested to sit.

Now crossed off the kid to-do list for the year: make slime. It's not my favorite activity, but I let them finally use up some glue and a whole lotta glitter.

And we finally got a fish tank! After visiting multiple stores a few times and researching online we decided on all the parts and then had to acquire them. We had to order and wait for the stand. We had to set up the tank, condition the water, and run the filter for 24 hours. We had to figure out how to make the must-have treasure chest bubble more slowly (go Frank!). We had to go to three stores to find the glo-fish the kids wanted. Finally a few days ago everything came together, and now we have six fish that were active and entertaining the first day and have been less so since then. But they are ours, and the kids have enjoyed feeding them and assigning them personalities. There's Pencil, a yellow one, Jigglypuff (Pokemon), a peachy-pink one, Tiger, a red striped one, Blue Jay, a light blue one, Skeleton, a translucent one with a bit of dark blue, and Clefairy (Pokemon), a hot pink one.

Originally Charlotte had wanted to name her pink ones Pinky 1 and Pinky 2, but she became really unhappy when I said "Let's not have names with numbers." It was a disagreement the whole way home. Then when Zach suggested the Pokemon character names she was suddenly fine with them.

I think we've got Gabe's room/guest suite all set up (for now at least). He really wanted an unconventional arrangement of his bed floating in the middle of the room so we just went with it, even though I think it would seem roomier basically any other way. It's set up like there's a little hallway into the room, there's the Lego table, pulled out with more room to sit at it, the guest bed corner, and Gabe's apartment. It's kind of funny that he has the biggest room but the least belongings.