I’ve made no secret around here about the fact that I love it when my kids are in school. We all just function more happily when we are on a school schedule. This is especially true now that I have a job. I have no idea how we are going to survive next summer with me working. Yee-ikes. I need to find a pool we can join that has outdoor wi-fi. (Ideas, anyone local?)
Anyway! Jonah is going to the same preschool he did last year, in the same program where he will also get speech and has an IEP and all that. He has the same teachers (who were also Sophie’s teachers) and we LOVE them and the program.
But. This year there is a “but”.
This year his school, which is a PreK-6 public elementary, changed their hours to 7:30-2. So his preschool class is 7:30-10:15 a.m.
And it is brutal for us in the morning.
Jonah’s not a particularly late sleeper, but he is NEVER awake when I go to pry him out of bed at 6:40 or so. He cries and does not want to get up, and I can’t blame him. I feel the same way, but I am a grown up so I have to suck it up and get up early. Also, we have to be out the door by 7:15 which means Bobby and the big kids can NOT be running late, because they have to get out of our way in the driveway. So we all leave basically at the same time and it’s pretty chaotic. With me working, I don’t want to waste his at-school time on my shower/makeup, so I have been showering at night and slapping on as much makeup as I can before we get out the door so I can work really hard for the 2.5 hours between when I drop him and when I have to leave the house to pick him up.
I really, really, really miss last year’s 9:10-11:55 time slot! I could put him in afternoon preschool but that would totally screw up my babysitting/work schedule, so it has to be morning.
So we are all going to have to suck it up. But I sure miss my cheerful morning boy. Every morning is a trial. I am actually relieved on Friday when he doesn’t go to school, because at least that is a morning off from stress (it’s also a morning off from getting any work done, of course.)
So yeah. That’s what’s happening. It’s worth it for him to have his beloved teachers, it really is. But I can only hope as the weeks go by he gets well-adjusted. He certainly is not there yet. I am sure it will happen JUST in time for Thanksgiving break. 🙂
I am going to try to make a long story a short-ish story: so here goes. Ever since I went on a little blog trip to the Lake Erie Shores & Islands area about 18 months ago, I’ve wanted to go back with my family. Finally, at the very end of summer (and even after school had started), we were able to get up there for a weekend for a hosted trip. That’s right, all our accommodations and event tickets were provided, but we paid for our wheels & meals. All the opinions about our experiences are my own. I was super-excited to see Lake Erie (it was winter when I visited) and Bobby and I decided to be “fun parents” for a weekend and take our kids to Cedar Point! That’s right, an amusement park. With rides. And lines. And other people. We waited until the day before to tell the kids and they were SO EXCITED! The whole weekend was a blast, and we loved every minute of our trip. Here are some of the great family fun attractions we saw when we were there.
Friday night we headed to Ghostly Manor Thrill Center, a family entertainment center. I had visited here on my previous trip and really wanted to take the kids. They have a super-scary haunted house which we skipped, but they also have skating, glow-in-the-dark mini-golf, a huge bouncy house area, and a suuuuuper-fun XD theater!
On the skating rink, you could do either scooters, roller blades, or skates! Fun to have options for the little ones.
My glow in the dark baby scootin’!
Jonah had an awesome time at the bouncy area, but I could not get any pics because he was a crazy animal running and bouncing everywhere! It was great fun and really wore him out! My favorite part was the XD theater. Sophie and I looooooved it and I could’ve spent way more time there. It was a blast!
If you are going to be in Sandusky, I highly recommend Ghostly Manor. It’s a whole lot of reasonably-priced family fun in one place.
When we were funned-out, we went to our lovely hotel accommodations at the Sawmill Creek Resort. This place is huge and beautiful! It has a golf course, a nature preserve, and beach access to Lake Erie. We loved our room – it even had a cozy fireplace and YES we did use it even in the summer! It was wonderful.
Happy place 🙂
As cozy as our room was, the kids were dying to get in the indoor pool! We had a lot of fun – and Sophie and I had some hot tub time, too! The facilities were super nice!
Of course Sawmill Creek has a gorgeous outdoor pool, too. We were just busy alll day when we were there, so we did our swimming at night both nights! Here’s a peek though.
Not pictured: Poolside bar!
My very favorite part of the Sawmill Creek Resort was the gorgeous beach at Lake Erie. We had so much fun – it was VERY windy but still a great afternoon at the beach. The wind did spoil our planned evening shoreline cruise though. 🙁 Too many whitecaps, said the captain!
It was really ever so beautiful. I was definitely struck with #LakeErieLove.
We traded the lake for the jungle…sort of…out next stop was the African Safari Wildlife Park. This is a park where you can drive thru and feed all kinds of wild animals from your car window. We’ve done something like this before in Virginia and the kids were so excited to experience it again. This park also had a great little zoo you could walk through, too! We were a little overwhelmed by how many animals there were to feed…we were literally stuck in an animal traffic jam a couple of times! Here are some scenes from our drive-thru feed-a-thon:
Our children kept getting scared and just GIVING the animals our feed cups…so we ran out of food pretty fast. OOPS! It was a really fun experience though!
Finally, the BIG, EXCITING, grande finale of our trip was the legendary amusement park, Cedar Point. Believe it or not, even though we are both lifelong Ohioans, neither Bobby nor I had EVER been! The kids were super-excited, although Joshua is a bit, ummm…timid, so we knew we probably weren’t going to be riding any of the big coasters. Kind of a bummer for mom and dad, but we will just have to make a return trip sans kids!
Measuring up to see what they were allowed to ride!
We had a lot of fun in the areas geared just for smaller kids. Jonah was not afraid to ride ANYTHING. He did awesome! He loved the Scrambler, the Matterhorn, and the bumper cars! We rode them all many, many times!
We stared off with the merry-go-round.We adored the Sky Ride!
This was the “biggest” ride we could get Joshua on – the Pipescream. It was a BLAST! But he was too nervous to enjoy it, party pooper. His three-year-old brother and seven-ear-old sister, however, LOVED it. 🙂
We really had an awesome day at Cedar Point. The weather was awesome, the lines were short, and the rides were FUN! The kids did great and we will definitely be back.
We will also definitely be back to the Lake Erie Shores & Islands area. We really want to get out on the lake, and Bobby and I would like to take a grown-up trip there and explore the islands, too.
Thanks to Sawmill Creek Resort, Ghostly Manor, African Safari Wildlife Park, Cedar Point, and Lake Erie Shores and Islands for hosting us. We can’t wait to go back!
Last week I posted about how I had finally had enough of the “decor” in our bathroom. In case you missed it – and so you can really get a feel for the drastic improvement – here’s the before:
Stenciled. Moose.
I looked at that for eight years!
In any case, last week when the boys were out of town, Kate and I were on a mission! I took the afternoon off from work, picked her up and went shopping. We started out at Sherwin Williams, and even though I had been researching Pinterest and Houzz and the rest of the interwebs for days, I still agonized over what color to pick once we were actually there. Eventually, though, we landed on Silvermist.
Then we hit HomeGoods, which, like its sister TJ Maxx, is my happy place, and got a little out of control! We bought towel bars, a shower curtain, a bath mat, towels and accessories. It was so fun! And affordable. I spent about $150 and got a ton of stuff.
Our last stop (or so I thought) was Lowe’s, where we picked out a lovely light fixture to replace this atrocity.
But, when we got home, after I gleefully tore down the pinecone wallpaper border, I took off the old fixture (and I didn’t even electrocute myself!) and discovered this.
Random holes in the drywall! Awesome. The base of the new light fixture was a small circle, and after consulting the google I determined that patching the drywall was out of my wheelhouse. So, the only other thing to do was to pick a different light that would cover that shit up.
I am all about quality workmanship, as you can see.
So, we trucked back to Lowe’s and picked up a new light with a much larger base. And also a pizza. We were back on track. Yay!
But wait, not so fast.
The first step in the installation instructions was to attach the fixture to the junction box, a metal thing that’s supposed to be attached to the studs in the wall. Except there wasn’t one in my wall – as you can see from the picture above, the wires were just sticking out of a hole. So there was nothing to attach the new fixture to. I turned to the google once again and determined I needed to install a junction box, but by this time it was after 8pm and our hardware store was closed. We decided it was time to start painting and deal with the light in the morning. Except that meant we were painting in the dark. Minor problem.
This is turning into a really long story.
Anyway, we rigged up some lights and extension cords and got to painting! By about 11:30, we were done… with the paint. Everything else was still a disaster, but we needed to call it a night. We headed to the hardware store the next morning, bought a junction box (from a man who was just slightly condescending, not that I’m bitter)… but the hole in the drywall wasn’t big enough for it. So I got out the hammer and made it bigger. Except I ran into two studs on either side before the hole got big enough.
At that point I started googling “hanging light fixture without junction box” and despite the fact that most of what I read indicated that said box was in fact necessary, I decided to try it anyway and hope for the best.
And it looks really good!
I just hope it doesn’t fall out of the wall and/or burn down the house.
Things went quickly from there, and pretty soon we had an entirely different bathroom.
Finally – here are the after pictures!
Wait… just one more “before” because if any of you made it this far you’ve probably forgotten what it looked like by now:
And now…
Honestly the pictures don’t do justice to how much better it looks. I mean, there was nowhere to go but up, but we just love it. Andy couldn’t believe it when he got home and said he would never doubt me again in the realm of home decor (although he also said he thought it “looked nice” before, so I’m not sure how much stock we can put into his opinion). Kate spent a few days just hanging out in the bathroom.
It was well worth the 18 hours and $300 it took to complete this project. I just wish we hadn’t waited eight years to do it!
Now I just want to refinish the cabinets and countertop and replace the sink and faucet. I’m sure there’s a YouTube video for that…
