The Pipsqueak continues really liking kindergarten, and her teacher is turning out to really be awesome. We've still had a few bits of extra anxiety here & there (and she's not sleeping by herself in her own bed every night), but all in all it's been A Good Thing for all parties involved. Miri even surprised the entire family by becoming... a cheerleader! She's not on the school's official squad (she's too young), but the after-school program has an informal cheerleading squad for their informal football team, and my niece apparently decided it looked like fun and signed herself up. So, not too much unlike her mother (back when she was on the cheering squad in junior high), every now & then my niece will suddenly be clapping & stomping rhythmically for no apparent reason, and she's had a lot of fun putting on a show for Grandma & Grandpa so they could see how she cheers.
Oh, and today is my sister's forty-Xth birthday, so Miri has periodically burst into a Mandarin-launguage birthday song at random times throughout the day. She also helped Mommy blow out the candles on her brownie cake, and couldn't hold back her excitement when Grandma told her she should go tell Mommy to look in the big box near the front door. :-) More news as developments occur... but now it's back to the past with a visit to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania!
We still haven't managed to get our whole group of adoption friends together for a trip to Dutch Wonderland (a site that Miri's been waiting to return to after last year's visit), but this year we did manage to have some friends join us. After our usual later-than-planned start and a couple of minor traffic-related misadventures along the way, we met up with Miri's BFF SH and her mom TH at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord for a big late lunch/early dinner up in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The family's been going to the Shady Maple on & off for years -- ever since Mom & Dad stopped there on their honeymoon more than six decades ago. It's not the world's greatest food but it is good food, and lots & lots of it, with lots & lots & lots of variety, and at a reasonable price. (Dude, it doesn't hurt that you can probably spot the place from low Earth orbit, so it's not too har to find!)
Anyway, we had a good belly-busting meal that culminated with the girls experimenting with the results of mixing different colors of slushies in their glasses. We then caravaned to our hotel (Country Inn of Lancaster, same place as last year and probably again next year) and took advantage of Dutch Wonderland's late afternoon entry special (if you go in after 5pm, it doesn't count against your full-day ticket that you can use for the next day). Having bought tickets online ahead of time [1], we pretty much sailed through the entrance -- once we pried the girls loose from the massive & strategically-located gift shop -- and had a good time wandering the park & taking advantage of several rides before closing time. We even bumped into Princess Brooke, the Safety Knight, and Duke the Dragon at the entrance so the girls got some really nice souvenir photos.
Oh, before I continue, a word about photos. Some dummy (not naming any names, here) made sure to charge both the regular & backup batteries for his camera, back up everything on the memory card, and even pack a mini-tripod... then left his camera sitting on the nightstand in his room. The result is that I was using my iPhone as still camera and video camera as well as GPS and communications device for the entire trip. The results weren't half-bad, despite maxing out the phone's memory & running the battery almost to total zero two days in a row, but there are fewer photos of the trip than usual. Coupled with my normal attempt to maintain at least some amount of privacy, this means there will only be limited illustrations in this serious of posts. Sorry... next time I'll tie the darn thing to my overnight case instead of leaving it laying around...!
Anyway, as I was saying... We returned to the hotel and soon had arranged for me to be in one room, our folks in the next, and the girls and their mommies in the 3rd. I slept quite well that night, but I understand it took a while for the bouncing, giggling, telling of stories, comparing of sleepytime fashions, etc. etc. etc. to draw to a close before the occupants of that 3rd room could get some shuteye.
On the other hand, I could hear both girls making loud happy noises on the "Crazy Plane" ride, but my sister couldn't exit the thing fast enough. We rode all the water rides (for some reason, we didn't get nearly half as wet on the log flume as we did last year) and got to see all the different diving shows (where sitting too close to the red "splash zone" seats made up for the log flume's shortcomings), and Miri even got her pony ride (missed due to bad timing last year). The bulldozer, panda, and bouncing frog rides warranted extra time. I avoided any of the high-G rides (roller coaster, Turtle Whirl, etc.) because it's still a little too close to this spring's eye surgery for such adventures, but it was a lot of fun to watch the girls enjoying themselves so much. (It was also nice to occasionally just site & talk with my folks while the Little Dynamo was busy getting AJ shaken, dizzy, spun around, or otherwise occupied.)
One feature that's new at the park this year is Exploration Island, where the main attraction is a scattering of nearly life-size animatronic dinosaurs. The Pipsqueak & SH enjoyed them, and the rest of the grownups were impressed, but... old dinosaur hand that I am [2] I was in hog heaven the entire time. I mean, c'mon -- how often do you get to interact with a young T-Rex, or a mama Triceratops and a couple of her babies? By coincidence, I have a few extra photos of this part of the park...
(Yes, I know the Pterosaur technically is not a dinosaur... it just looked too cool to leave out.) All the grownups were excited to learn that the Shunosaurus is a "Chinasaur," but the girls didn't seem halfway as impressed with that fact. The only thing that bothered me about this particular installation (the animatronic figure itself was impressive, even "breathing" like a living creature) was that DW's careful fact-checking apparently did not extend to the grammar used in the sign's language...
There was also the usual scattering of "DON'T" signs throughout the area, but they all had a sense of humor so they didn't break up the "family" feeling of the place. These three were among my favorites:
The "Do Not Touch" sign made me laugh, because I have a photo of Uncle Beazley as the desktop picture on my laptop, and Miri knows him well from our visits to the National Zoo. I remember when he was located on the Mall downtown in front of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, usually with a small horde of kids clambering up, down, and all around... some invariably in the exact same pose as shown on the sign. But I digress...
I had seen on the DW website that they had recently experienced some flooding, and had been worried that Exploration Island and the associated rides (highway, gondola, and jungle boat) would be closed, but all were operating normally. However, the water level was still a bit higher than usual, as shown in the animated GIF below.
I swear I left a couple of hairs between the boards of that bridge... but all's well that ends well, and we all enjoyed a full day at the park. The only feature we didn't take advantage of was the water park, but none of us minded too much because we were all happily tuckered out. After a more-expensive-than-planned sojourn in the DW gift shop, we tried to find the restaurant where we'd eaten last year (the waitress took a shine to Dad as soon as she saw his "USS Coral Sea - CV43" cap and gave us all the veterans' discount plus a free serving of pie for Dad), but we ended up at a different chain restaurant and still managed to have an OK dinner before returning to our rooms and collapsing contentedly into our beds (with much less pre-lights out activity, I understand).
[1] You can get much better deals on DW tickets if you buy them online in advance than you can at the park or even through "special" pricing at the local hotels. Just print out the ticket pages (complete with their barcodes) at home & bring 'em with you to the park.
[2] I was into dinosaurs before it was cool. Growing up, I was on a first-name basis with the dinosaur exhibits in New York's Museum of Natural History. It got to the point where, when I was around 4 years old, Mom started telling me something about one of the dinos we were looking at and I corrected her -- and when she tried to tell me something different, a nearby museum guard interrupted with, "I'm sorry, Ma'am, but your son is right...!"
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