When Driving 11 Hours is Totally Worth It

I hate road trips.

So when I booked a small intimate resort 8.5 hours away (Lost Lake Lodge in Nisswa, MN), my husband thought I'd gone off the deep end. What's 8.5 hours when there are cabins to sleep in, a private lake to swim in, award winning food to stuff your face in, and most of all, family memories to create??  I failed to  imagine that when I booked this adventure, I'd have a newly potty trained 26 month old with us and that 8.5 hours would turn into 11 hours.

Did I mention how I always hated road trips?

There's nothing like that family memory of hanging out on the side of the road watching your daughter take an enormous crap in her baby bjorn when we had just stopped at 17 different flushable toilets each time she cried "POOPY!" (or WOLF).

Once we arrived to our idyllic resort nestled in the birch forest and saw the hammocks hung on trees and a private lake with canoes, we bolted from the car like clowns in a circus and ran straight to the beach.

This is the kind of resort where your kids make friends with the kids staying in the next cabin, where they can run free and you're only kind of concerned, and where you don't have to keep them away from the TV because there are none!

Breakfast & Dinner is included which means you don't have to cook or decide where our next meal is coming from. And what a meal! 4-course dinners and 2-course breakfasts make sure no one is walking away hungry or needing a lunch.  The small private lake and beach on one side is tiny and perfect for little feet in the sand or in a rowboat, and the lake on the other side is perfect for renting that Pontoon boat you always thought you might want to buy (um, no). Ladder ball, basketball, and badminton are at the beach too, along with a "Garage" with pool tables and old time video games. And let's not forget some classics like shuffleboard and horse shoes.

 When not at the resort ... Head out and rent bikes to trek the Paul Bunyan Trail, try go-carting and mini-golf, and make sure to stop for some small mini-donuts made fresh on the bike trail.

At night, enjoy your dessert after diner -- liquored-up coffee -- and light the bonfire at the beach. The best part is that when you go get the matches at the front desk, they give you a bag with everything to make s'mores too!

Our son asked, "Is this vacation?" It is, and we'll always remember it. And it only took 10 hours to get home.

Cats for Sale

Dear Cats,
I'm listing you both on eBay. I've had enough. I just got done extricating a huge poop out of my daughter's underwear, and I come downstairs to find that you vomited all over the family room carpet. Haven't I had enough disgusting bodily functions for one day? I get boogers wiped on my shirt, sneezes blown in my face, and demands to have 2 different asses wiped clean of crap. Do I need your vomit too?

Keep petting me until I tell you to stop, which is never.

And while we're at it:

• I'm not feeding you at 3 a.m. so you both can stop meowing at the top of your lungs.
• Thank you for ripping a hole the size of a chipmunk in the screen trying to get out of the house.
• No, I'm not going to pet you for 2 hours after the kids fall asleep.
• Stop leaving furballs around the house the size of mice.
• I'm sick of dropping $200 every time I have to bring you to the vet
• I'm sick of dropping $100 every week for your damn special cat food because you have damn urinary crystals that may cause you to either pee on our bed or die.

That's all I can think of now and I will for sure be leaving all of this off my eBay listing and instead describe you two as "very furry, very lovable, cats who enjoy laying in your lap [digging their nails into your bare skin.]"

Putting an ad in the paper for Mary Poppins

My daughter fell off of her chair last night at dinner.

The whole thing took place in slow motion, and yet I'm still not sure how it happened. Her entire chair fell to its side, taking my daughter down and her dinner plate up in the air. As my luck would have it, we were having quinoa so the airborn plate created a quinoa rain shower over the dinner table. As the person nearest to her, I reached out my hand and clutched her leg just in time so that her fall was a little softer. Nevertheless she still ended up face down, belly down on the floor covered in quinoa and chicken. 

In this house, I would expect nothing less than for a tumble off a chair to create a mess the size of the tri-state area.

I only have 2 children, but everything in this house seems to be louder, messier, crazier than a house full of Dugans (they have what, like 19 kids?)

One day my aunt stopped by after an acupuncture appointment.  She could only stay for a few minutes. Now my aunt's house is so clean and quiet it's like visiting Jefferson's Monticello. I'm pretty sure she she attaches velvet ropes across all her rooms and only allows her family to occupy 3 rooms in the house. You can drop by without notice and it looks like no one but a curator and people dressed up in period wear pretending to stoke a fire live here.

So my aunt visits and probably spends about 15 minutes with me and the kids in which they run around, play with toys all over the floor, messily eat lunch, and probably have a tantrum over what color their plate was.  To which my aunt looked and me and says, "You need Mary Poppins."

"I thought the mom in Mary Poppins was a suffragette," I began, "not just plain suffering?"

My aunt also has 2 children and claims that they both took 3-hour naps until they were 7 and never played with dirt and never got food on the floor and ... Well, we all know that parents suffer from amnesia when it comes to their kids. So I'm enjoying my messy house, my messy dinners, and my messy kids knowing that one day I'll be telling them, "I don't know why your children are Gila Monsters? You guys were so quiet and played so nice and never made a mess or threw your food."

One day.

Organizing Photos into a Photo Album

I completed my first Photo Album as well as organized my entire photo collection ... from 2011.

Alright, I realize it's mid-2014 here but I made a dent in the 14,000 photos taking up precious space on my hard drive, so I feel like I should be wearing a tiara or that crown from Burger King. Tackling these photos was a monster -- iPhoto is just another basement where I throw stuff I don't want to deal with.

What inspired this project was a Pin on Organizing Photos. You can read her post (which is awesome and in great detail, but she talks about printing photos which I gave up on), or you can read my version (the lazy blogger version). Take your pick.

How to:

iPhoto sorted by Month/Year

1. Sort Photos: All of my photos were in iPhoto already sorted by month/year. If yours aren't, do that first. (Also don't forget to grab your husbands phone and get his photos into your library).

 2. Cull Photos: This is the hard part, and took me a long time. I basically went through each month 3-4 different times at different time periods and deleted photos. For instance: August 2011 started with 275 photos, after 4 different deleting sessions over a few weeks/months, I got it down to 128. Some months I got down to 50, but that's like March when nothing happens.

I kept my progress detailed in my spiral notebook of which months I did, where I left off, etc so I could pick up at any time.

If you have time ... you can also crop and fix all your photos. I meant to do this but time just escaped. I agree that any photo I did crop looked better. Oh well. I'm not Ansel Adams.

How long did this take? I started deleting photos in December 2013 and finished March 2014.

3. Start Photo Book: There's a few to choose from. I made mine through Shutterfly choosing the softcover, Year in Review model. Now if I thought deleting photos took a long time, making the book took even longer. It's online and ended up being 94 pages so it crashed a lot on me and was also slow to load. Then creating the pages themselves just took a lot of time, effort, and brain power -- which I was working mostly after 9PM and my brain officially shuts down at 5PM.



This I also kept detailed in the spiral notebook, listing which months were made vs which months were now finalized.

I started the book in March and finished June 1st. The book arrived today: June 11th.

Notice the 1st page where I left the stock wording ...


4. Back-up photos: Once the book was sent off to the publisher, I resized all the photos (some were like 3MB) and then put them all both on a DVD and on my external back-up drive. And they came off my computer.

Some notes on making a Photo Book:

1. Online the photos look smaller: Seeing the pages now, I wish I hadn't done some of the 2-photo pages or the larger photos. The small sized photos looked like postage stamps online but they ended up being perfect size to capture a series of photos from a vacation, or holiday.

Like did I really need this ginormous photo of my cat?


2. I like the pre-done pages: This party page was a pre-set idea page you can choose and I like how that turned out. It's hard to have the time to stylize 94 individual pages.


Here's another one -- vacation.


3. It's expensive: Look for coupons and deals. If you don't need it right away, sit on your finsihed book until a deal comes. Mine was ready around Father's Day so there was free shipping and discounts. Even then, the 94 pages came to over $60. But I figures, printing each photo and buying books would be around the same thing.

4. I wish the spine wasn't blank: This will end up on my bookshelf so I wish the spine had the title from the front.

Final Verdict: I like the book a lot but I like trying other things so for 2012, I'm trying MyPublisher. So far it's not as "cutesy" as the Year in Review pages and doesn't have pre-done pages with their "bling" but I'm okay with that. I can compare them when I get this done ... next year.

The Money Pit strikes again

This winter we celebrated 9 years of living in The Money Pit. My husband and I can't believe we've lasted this long: this house is one big headache. But something called "excellent schools" and "terrible resale value" is making us stay put and the house is very happy eating away at our savings account one check at a time.

This week I wrote out a check for a new, professionally installed window well cover.

This window well used to hide under a splintering, decrepit wood porch that we finally took down 2 years ago to make way for a patio and now it's exposed for our kids to jump on. So we put a cover on it. Done.

before

Two years and many rain storms, heat waves, and -20 degree days later, we finally had a nice day with the kids playing in the backyard. Nice, until Caligula my daughter took one look at it and decided to pretend it was a bounce house ... and fell right through --- 3-1/2 feet down into the well!

With Cerberus, her Trio of Bears on guard

Luckily the bottom was soft-- or at least that's what my husband said from inside. He saw the whole thing happen and dove in to rescue her -- right after throwing his glass of beer up in the air.  We were so lucky the cracked piece didn't cut her ... I'm still in shock over the whole thing.

Anyway, after kindly refusing my dad's offer of covering it with a sheet of plywood which he would gladly bring over from his collection of "bits & fragments of the last 50 years" stashed in his garage, we were on the phone with a window well company and had it promptly installed.  Voila.

After

 The warranty says "lifetime" and the weight max is 250lb.  We'll see.

Kids for Hire

What I've learned from watching Disney's Cinderella is that washing your floors on your hand & knees is the best method. Singing while washing, however, does not make it more enjoyable -- nor does it summon birds and mice to my aid.

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Today I was on my hands and knees wiping the bathroom floor because, according to the Cleaning Schedule of my role as Household Sanitation Director (AKA the unpaid maid), this should have happened on Tuesday.

My son walks in, "Can I help?" (Queue the theme song from Chariots of Fire)

Never one to turn down cleaning help and a firm believer that misery deserves company, I hand him a rag, point to the bathroom sink full of soapy water, and put him to work.

I expected -- well what I expected was for him to act like how I did as a kid which was to pretend I didn't see my mom cleaning and walk the other way. But no, he helped me clean the whole floor (which is quite small but nonetheless) and then asked if he could clean the cabinets too ("of course!"). From there we moved to the bedroom floor because I had a captive audience and I was not against exploiting the moment. Plus, they were really dusty.

Capturing this once in a lifetime moment.

 My daughter stayed away for the most part. When she did pop her head in, my son told her, "I have so much work to do!" Believing this to be a party she wasn't invited to, and being a known party crasher even at her tender age of 23 months, she grabbed the nearest thing (a bath towel) and got down on her knees and started to clean too.

Looking at my two pride & joys, I felt just a wee twinge of guilt -- and a lot like Cinderellas Evil step-mother -- but what the hell, my floors are clean and I didn't have to pay bribe anyone to do it.

Kiawah Island

The 2nd leg of our journey took us to Kiawah Island.

I didn't have high hopes after my son shielded his eyes exiting the airport screaming,"There's too much sun!" We've been holed up like hermits in Chicago this Fall, Winter, and let's just add Spring to the list too... Sun is new to these kids.

I agonized over this part of the vacation. There's only about 4,000 rental options to choose from and we had never been before so you're trusting your gut. Good thing mine is full of probiotics.

A few things to know about Kiawah:

1. It's a private island. You need to be staying on the island, or know someone who is, to get on (same for neighboring Seabrook). And even when you're on, there are places you can't go (Vanderhorst Plantation).

If you want to do a beach day on Kiawah and you're not staying on the island, Beach walker Park is open to the public.

2. There are alligators. There are lagoons and signs that say "Danger! Don't feed or bother the alligators." As if! We stayed on the lagoon and saw them a few times. There are also a lot of bugs ... they are the kind you don't seems to see and then you looks down and have 20 bug bites on your legs.

Our alligator swimming in the lagoon

3. The pools are for resort privileges only. This means that if you rent a condo, make sure it has these privileges to enjoy the pools. And I recommend it if your kids are little - the pools are 0-depth and are mini splash parks.

West Side Beach pool

 The beaches however are beautiful! Wide open with boardwalks over dunes to preserve the natural terrain. The sand is very fine and will stick to everything!

4. Bikes. Rent them! You won't regret it! We rented ours for our 3 full days there and it took us everywhere we wanted to go. The bike paths are paved nice and pretty easy to follow (we got lost a little - well not lost but more like our paths always went straight to the beach!) You can also bike on the beach if your thighs need a workout.

5. Not too many restaurants.  The resort restaurants were expensive but lovely. We ate at Jasmin's Porch for dinner and Mother's Day brunch. But we also ate poolside one afternoon and the food was good and reasonable. There are a few good restaurants nearby, so we had dinner on John's Island at Fat Hen -- I sucked the LowCounty Lemonade down. Freshfields is right at the island entrance and has a few restaurants and grocery store too.

Mothers Day Brunch on the Terrace

I need one of these right now.

Where did we decide to stay?  Condo on the ocean? 10-bedrom villa in Vanderhorst Plantation? In the end we chose a 2-story townhouse across the street from the beach that had resort pool priviledges which we rented through VRBO.com. The actual Kiawah island resort managed the property (even though it was owned privately) which made check in/out a breeze and we weren't worried about being scammed.  Next time we go, we feel that we can stay further from the beach and bike there (if it saves money).

On the balcony for Mothers Day

Home Away from Home

 This was a great place to come visit and we know we'll be back and as the kids get older there will be different and exciting stuff to do -- like fishing for crabs and maybe an alligator tour?