Back Home Again In Indiana: Great Wolf Lodge - aka, Part Three of Melanie's Fourth Birthday

On our way home from Great Wolf Lodge on Monday, I promised Jeff that future birthdays, while special, might not need this multi-phased approach. This was Melanie's fourth celebration, if you count the cupcakes at school!

We left Indy for Cinci on Sunday 3/4 around noon. It took us about 20 minutes just to get from our house to the interstate....stopped for lunch, went back to the house for a drink, etc...It took us just about 2 hours flat to get to Great Wolf Lodge. We were in the water pretty quickly. But, during the 24-hour visit, we had a lot of other things to do/visit as well! First, let's see some pictures around the lodge.....

This was literally at 6:30am on Monday morning. We had to keep ourselves occupied until we could buy Jeff coffee; stores didn't even open until 7am

Mel with the donut chef

Joey the Wolf

Joey coloring

"Hello, Friend, what's your name?"

They actually had both the kids' names. Not sure why I had to spend $8 on them, but there you have it.

Not quite tall enough to ride the big slides, but getting there!

Our room had a separate kids and adults area. Our kids were really excited about that; and yet we realized on the way there we haven't slept away from our house since early fall 2011. We will be unlikely candidates to visit another hotel room before 2013. Pictures in the room....

Mel was really excited about the top bunk

Joe was less excited about the bottom bunk

C'mon, Mel, let me up there!

You suckers can't get us, we're on the top bunk!

Okay, we're done with bunkbeds. Let's go to the waterpark!!

Joe with the bear

Peanuts - Linus with his blankie

Surely someone is going to spill something

Batman Wolf & His Mommy

Joey and his bedtime bears

Melanie didn't take long to warm up to the waterslides. There were five in the "small" area, and she had them all mastered quickly. There were two in the "medium" area - by the time we discovered them on Monday, they were out of commission. The other, "BIG" slides, she didn't qualify for, as she's not yet 42". However, I slipped away at one point and rode the biggest one, and that made me happy.

This was Melanie's facial expression most of the weekend! This is what made it worth it!!

The water was pretty chilly for our little ones. We had blue lips and chattering teeth quite a bit. We discovered the hot tubs later on Sunday, and those were a hit to warm up. While most logic says not to take babies into hot tubs, these didn't have jets and such - they were just warm, and we stayed in them less than 10 minutes a pop.

Daddy warming up the kids

One of Melanie's favorite areas was the wave pool. We need to get this girl back to the ocean soon. She went from being overwhelmed with the waves (in a life jacket), to going out on her own, sans jacket.

Great Wolf Lodge had a lot of other things to do, too. At 8pm, they have a pajama story at the clock tower, followed by story time. Melanie was all for this idea, until the inanimate objects (trees, heads, owls, etc) started talking. She then wanted to go get Daddy to bring her back to the storytime, which they watched from our 3rd-floor vantage point.

Getting ready for pajama story time!

Concentrating very hard while awaiting story time

They also had an arcade, which opened one hour before the water park Monday morning (the only reason we visited it, since my goal in life is to avoid Chuck E. Cheese's as long as humanly possible).