We traditionally prefer to spend our Valentine's Day weekend getting our redneck on at Caribbean Cove indoor water park.
In my opinion, indoor water parks are just one of those things that are automatically classified as redneck. Normal people in swimsuits, misbehaving children, questionably safe activities, hot dogs, arcade with prizes, inner tubes--these things, while quite normal in isolation, when put in combination are very redneck, and in a large, public, indoor swimming hole, are very, VERY redneck.
I'm quite at home here, as you might imagine.
As are we all. There is, traditionally, frolicking----and shopping at the nearby Goodwill Outlet Store (ask Sydney sometime about her brand-new-to-her two-foot-tall realistic-looking plastic pony), and miniature golfing, and a family screening of Dinotopia (we have gotten WAY into Dinotopia), and picnic lunches----because we can't afford Caribbean Cove and anything other than peanut butter all at the same time, and, of course, bucket-dumping:Since last year I posted a photo of Matt getting water dumped on him, I told him that I wanted to post a photo of him doing the same thing this year, so he dutifully went and stood under the bucket. But every time the bucket dumped, I'd yell out, "I didn't get it that time, Matty! Can you do it just one more time?" I managed to get him to stand under that bucket and get dumped on FOUR times before he caught on.
Five has been a big year for Willow so far--losing her first tooth, learning to read, learning to ride a bicycle, becoming a kindergartner--and this weekend was no exception to the string of heart-breakingly big firsts, because THIS year, unlike all the other years we've come to Caribbean Cove previously, Willow is over 42" tall, and thus she can ride the water slides:Trust me, she's in that photo, riding in the front of the inner tube that's also holding her father, but the splash is so big that you can't even see her.
It's not necessarily your typical hearts-and-flowers-and-Cupid Valentine weekend, but if you ask Happy Girl #1----and Happy Girl #2--
--they'll assure you that it's the perfect Valentine weekend for us.