What a weekend!

 Monster Monday!

It's Monday again. The weekends always go by so fast. This weekend was a good weekend for us though, we took a mini family vacation since my husband is leaving very soon. 

Since this was our last weekend as a family we wanted to do something fun. My first thought was to go to Great Wolf Lodge, we always have a great time there. If we weren't on any kind of a budget Great Wolf Lodge would have enjoyed the Zroback family for the weekend. I just about had a heart attack when they told me it would be $900 for the 2 nights! That didn't include food, souvenirs or activating the kids MagiQuest wands. Okay, where else can we go? I know, we can go up to Indianapolis! Wait, No we cant. There are absolutely NO hotels with even 1 room available. I forgot that the stupid Super Bowl was this weekend AND that it was in Indianapolis. Okay, third times a charm, right? I finally decided we would go up to Cincinnati. Found a great deal on a hotel and found someone to keep the dog for the weekend.

We left Thursday after the kids got out of school. That night we just relaxed at the hotel and took the kid swimming for a little while. Aubrey was VERY impressed with the hotel. They had a dispenser in the shower for shampoo, conditioner and body wash. She came out of the bathroom and said "How can we afford to stay at a place like this? It's SO fancy" I swear, that girl is so easily impressed. She cracks me up!

Fancy shower dispenser at our hotel.

Friday we went to the Cincinnati Premier Outlet Mall. After spending almost 2 hours walking around the Coach store and picking up about 20 different purses my husband and kids were bored out of their minds. My husband was even willing to let me get 2 purses just to get us out of there, but then that just made me even more decisive on which one(s) to get. I finally decided on just one. Then we headed over to the Crocs store to let them kids pick out some new Crocs (they didn't take near as long to pick out shoes as I did to pick out a purse) I dont remember Crocs being so freaking expensive! Holy Hannah. But, the kids were happy and that was what the weekend was about, right?

Coach = Love

After we were done at the outlet mall we headed over to Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. They had 3 different museums and a Omnimax theater. We decided to buy a pass for everything. The Omnimax movie was really neat. It was called Rocky Mountain Express. It was about the building of the railroad in and around the Rocky Mountains. There were a few times both Shayne and I felt a little dizzy and kind of sick (does that mean we are getting old?) But we made it through the whole thing. Next we went to the Natural History Museum, we could have spend ALL day in just this one Museum! They had so many awesome things. There was a recreation of a cave that you could walk through, you could take the easy route or the difficult route. I stuck with the easy route since the difficult one had stairs (I dont do well with stairs) and there were some tight places you had to get through (majorly claustrophobic) Shayne and the girls went through the difficult route.  There was a whole area that was all about animals that are extinct, VERY COOL! Lots and lots of hands of stuff that the kids loved. We decided to skip the Cincinnati History Museum and go down to the Duke Energy Children's Museum. Turned out is was for little kids so we only stayed for about 30 minutes. Shayne was dead set on finding a Man vs Food place to go for dinner, even though he wouldn't be doing the challenge. We ended up at Izzy's. It is a sandwich place and the challenge is to eat a giant ass Ruben in 30 minutes or less!

Maddy and Aubrey at Izzy's

 After dinner we went back to our "fancy" hotel and relaxed for the rest of the night. All that walking had caused me to be in lot of pain and I was exhausted! (Thanks for that stupid MS)


Saturday we checked out of the hotel and headed over to the Newport Aquarium. We had heard that it was a really good Aquarium and I saw online that they do a Penguin march every morning at 10:00 in the lobby. We got there early and were SO excited to see the Penguin march.We waited and then HERE THEY COME!! Wait, those Penguin's aren't marching. They are in a cart and are being pushed. BOOOOOO! Oh well, at least we got to see some Penguins up close. We headed into the Aquarium and we were packed in like a bunch of sardines! There were so many people there, and you dont realize just how rude people really are until you are around a whole bunch of them all at once! 
We got over all the rude people and went on to have a awesome time. They had a live dive show. Two divers got in one of the big tanks with fish, sharks and turtles. They gave us a bunch of facts about the different fish and other aquatic animals at the Aquarium while big sharks were swimming around them. I think this was my favorite things about the whole place. There was a Rain Forest room with a bunch of different birds flying all over the place (next time I will bring a umbrella) The girls got to feed them some nectar while Shayne hid under a overhang.

This bird wasn't sharing the Nectar.

Oh and there were these GIANT crabs, I mean GINORMOUS! They were so cool. They had what looked like little faces on their stomachs. I bet they would have tasted good with a little bit of melted butter! :)

Japanese spider crabs

We of course spent way to much in the gift shop, but we got some really cool souvenirs. It was a great family weekend where lots of memories were made! I am very happy that we were able to do this before my husband deploys and has to be away from us for a year.