Birthday surprise at Elitch Gardens

The monday after Jack's official birthday we surprised him with a trip to 6 Flags Elitch Gardens in Denver. It happened to be my actual birthday that day so it was a trip for me too... although I couldn't ride any of the rides, but it was still a fun day.

 Jack and Lily are both little thrill seekers.

 Jack has no fear at all when it comes to rides. Lily is a little more cautious, but still enjoys a thrill

 Jack was happy to be tall enough to go on some of the big kid rides

 And even Lily was able to go on some pretty exciting rides too

 Jack's favorite was the viking ship that goes up and down.

 Elitch Gardens had a special offer to buy a refillable cup of beer and/or soda. Kids and I shared the soda cup and Luke was happy for his refillable beer mug

They even have a water park so we spent some time here

 But it was freezing!

 Too much fun for one little girl.

As I look back on all these pictures it looks like an amazing day. But like most of my posts, the behind the scenes look includes lots of crying and tantrums and other not so fun memories that were not photographed.

Take, for example the poop incident:

After a long day of walking Luke and I took the kids to a kid play area where we could sit down and relax and let the kids run around. We were able to sit for about 30 minutes when Jack and Lily came running to us saying that Lily had pooped. Lily has been potty trained since before she was two and never has accidents so it was quite a shock to find out she pooped. And it was a lot! I had to take her to the nearest bathroom while Luke went to check out the play area. Once in the bathroom cleanup proved much more difficult than expected. First of all, there was a lot of poop! Second, this was a bathroom with no paper towels, only air dryers. So trying to clean up the mess with just toilet paper was very frustrating. And then, we didn't pack any change of clothes for the kids so I ended up having Jack take off his underwear and just wear his shorts, while Lily wore his underwear as shorts. Once she was cleaned up, we went back to the play area which had to be shut down and sanitized as there was poop in one of the slides as well. 

Then, there was Jack's incident:

After dealing with the poop and play area, we took the kids to the bathroom to wash hands. Luke and Jack went in the boys bathroom and a couple minutes later I heard screaming. Apparently Luke had put Jack on the counter to reach the soap/water. Jack proceeded to take lots and lots of soap and then when he went to wash his hands, he slipped and fell backward off the sink onto the concrete floor. This is pretty typical of Jack and I can't even count the number of times he has cracked/bumped his head. But this time his response was exasperated by the fact he was exhausted. He screamed and screamed and screamed. We offered to get both kids ice cream as we walked out and they gave us an ice pack for Jack's head. He had a pretty nasty bruise/egg from the incident. 

After ice cream the park closed, and you couldn't imagine how we looked walking out of that park. Lily was in Jack's underwear and Jack was still crying with an ice pack on his head and both kids were covered in chocolate ice cream. I should have taken a picture. Those are the moments behind the scenes that I rarely write about but which are still a major part of daily life with these kiddos.