Mini Vacation

At the beginning of April, we took a mini vacation to Billings. We originally planned to do it in February, but the weekend we planned it turned out to be a huge blizzard, so we had to cancel our plans and reschedule. We spent the night at a hotel with a pool and a couple water slides. For some reason, I forgot to take pictures of pretty much everything. Sam had a lot of fun. I lost track of how many times he went down that slide. We had to catch him at the bottom because it was too deep for him to touch at that spot. One of the slides was a really fast slide. Sam decided he wanted to go down that one. Charlie went down first so he could catch Sam at the bottom. He decided it was probably too fast for Sam, but Sam was determined to go down. Well, it was too fast. He got a mouthful of water, and he didn't like it very much. At least he kept going down the other one.

The next day, we headed over to the mall. I thought Sam would have fun at Tilt. I remember going to Tilt as a kid and having a blast. Apparently, it's not geared toward kids anymore. All the racing games were too big for Sam to be able to reach the pedals. He sat on my lap while he played, but he wasn't very interested. They had a lot of claw machines, but I've never been to good at them. I think we tried once, then I explained to Sam that we would probably have more fun spending the money on other games.

 One of his favorite games was a pull machine, like Wheel of Fortune. But it was expensive. I let him do it a few times, but didn't want to do it much because it cost a lot.

Another one of his favorites was a game that would shoot out a ball, then it would bounce around for a while until it fell in a hole. It looked pretty cool, but it was expensive as well. We were there for probably half an hour and spent around $20 and ended up with enough tickets to get a few cheap kaleidoscopes. We left pretty bummed. We visited some family and went to lunch, then caught up with Charlie's parents, who were in Billings that day. At some point, it was suggested that we go to Chuck E. Cheese instead. I felt silly that I hadn't thought of it before. Sam had a much better time. We were there for a long time for probably the same amount of money. We all wandered around playing difference games. Sam had two favorites. One was air hockey. There was an air hockey table at Tilt, but yet again, it was expensive, so we couldn't play it much. All the games at Chuck E. Cheese were a quarter each, so we were able to play quite a few times.

His other favorite game was a racing game. The "pedals" were on the handlebars, so Sam was able to control everything by himself. We played that one until there was a line of kids waiting to play. Then I told Sam we needed to do something else for a while to give everyone else a turn. We came back to it later.

Brett hung out with Grandma and Grandpa while we played.

At some point, we headed over to Toys R Us. It was a compromise from a store in the mall that Sam wanted to get something that was around $40 (ok, I wanted to get it for him too, but Charlie said no). We told him he could spend $10 on whatever he wanted. He's been big into Pokemon lately, so we found some Pokemon. He got a Pokeball with Pikachu inside and was very happy. We also got him a bigger bike for his birthday since his current bike was way too small for him. It was a much better way to end the vacation rather than Tilt. Sam was very happy and we all had lots of fun.