Great Wolf Lodge!

Eating at Fritz's train restaraunt

After lunch

Getting ready for swimming fun!

Storytime before bed in the lobby

With the wolf after storytime

Getting ready for bed! Love them so much!!!

Swimming

Just got done with the slide!

Swimming

Lazy river

We loved hanging out in the hot tub!!!

Finally conquered his fear of the slide and then LOVED it!

Jack went down the big slide!

The big waterfall!

We had a great time!

For the past 3 yrs we have taken a mini-vacation to Great Wolf Lodge in KC every year. This year we decided to coincide it with Ellie's birthday and asked her (ok "conned" her into it!) if she would like to do Great Wolf Lodge in place of a friend birthday party. Her class this year wasn't extremely close and Ellie has so many "random" friends that I was thinking it would be hard to pick who to invite, etc and plus I think a night at Great Wolf Lodge sounds more fun than a birthday party :) She agreed to it and so the weekend that we got out of school we headed down to Great Wolf and spent Sunday to Monday. The kids had a ball! We started off by eating at Fritz's Train restaurant. It's a cute little restaurant (fast food) that has trains running over your head and then your food gets delivered by an overhead train. The food is just "glorified" fast food but it was fun to have it delivered by a train! After lunch we headed to the lodge to check in and start swimming! It's funny that we go all the way to GWL and Ellie's favorite thing to do is swim in the big pool---not the slides, not the lazy river but just the big pool--she is easy to please! Her and Dave did go on a few slides the first day and we spent a lot of time in the lazy river! Jack is not so adventurous when it comes to water and much preferred splashing around in the kiddie area! By the 2nd day Dave had finally got him to (forced him to!) go down the little kiddie slides and low and behold he LOVED them and proceeded to go down them about 100 times! He's so funny--he's so nervous and cautious but once he's almost "forced" to do something he loves it (sounds just like his mom!!) What a hoot! He had a ball and by the 2nd day I was brave enough enough to go down the big slides with Ellie and guess what....I loved them! I only wish I had discovered them sooner because they were so fun. The past few times that we have gone I have always used the excuse that I would watch Jack while Dave and Ellie went down the slides but boy have I been missing out! So much fun!! The kids of course loved the hotel room and after dinner at Chipotle  we went down for the storytime before bed--such a cute tradition! We had a great time and always love going to GWL for a night! We didn't make it to the T-Rex restaurant like we normally do but we'll do that next year. On our way out of town to come home we stopped for an early dinner at the train restaurant again and then headed home! Great family fun celebrating Ellie's birthday! Now we have her actual birthday coming up and are looking forward to our annual Kobe tradition!!