Small Kids in Confined Spaces

January 02, 2014

The day after Christmas, we headed back to Leavenworth for a dose of Winter Wonderland. Only Winter didn’t cooperate this year. Any bit of landscape that had decent southern exposure was completely barren. None of the ski trails were open. People who planned vacation around serious winter sports discovered new levels of despair.

Luckily, this is what our kids think of as “serious winter sports”:

Full Speed Ahead

Swimming

(What? Swimming is a serious winter sport? Of course!)

And luckily, the Sleeping Lady resort is nestled in valley that protects it from most direct winter sun, so the landscape outside our room looked like this:

Icicle River

So the vacation wasn’t the disaster I’d feared listening to the snow reports. The kids had a blast: Sledding, “hiking” (short walks up a rocky snow-covered hill), swimming, playing foosball in the game room, and movie night every night (arranged by the resort).

But, admittedly for the parents, this trip had a little too much “small kids in confined spaces.” It’s just too hard to keep the kids occupied outside in the cold, especially when all the white stuff outside is hard-packed snow/ice (great for sledding but not much else). Everybody’s a little to close together for a little too long… siblings start needling each other… tempers get short… you know how it is. We couldn’t have lasted another day. It was good to come home.