I didn’t publicize on my blog last week that we were leaving to go on vacation on Thursday.  I figured you can’t be too safe.  However, if you follow me on Facebook you’ll know what happened.  However, if you don’t, you can read below about our vacation, what happened, and what our next steps will be to fix the situation.

We left Thursday morning right after Madison’s awesome parent teacher conference.  It’s great hearing about how great your kid is.  :)  We came home right after her conference (which was scheduled for 8:10 am) and finished packing.  We did not tell the kids where we were going.  We then dropped the dog off at Grandma’s house and headed out for our 3 hour drive.  We didn’t even make it to the state line before the kids had to go to the bathroom.  Even though we only used a quarter of a tank of gas (we were in the van), it was quite a bit cheaper there, so I filled up while Bill took the kids inside.

From there, we drove as far as Janesville, WI and ate at Fuddruckers.  If you have never been there, it is the most awesome hamburger joint.  From there, we drove all the way to Wisconsin Dells and to the Wilderness Resort (yes, this is different than Great Wolf Lodge.)  Once the kids realized we were at an indoor waterpark, they were super excited.

We checked in, unloaded in our room, and got changed.  The really cool thing is that there are 3 indoor parks here, so we had a choice of where to go and play.  Thursday night went awesome, and the kids were sleeping by 8 pm.  (To save money, we had brought lunch meat and bread to make sandwiches and chips.  The first night that’s all the kids wanted).  The kids really worked themselves out that first day:

Day 2 was a lot of fun too (this would be Friday).  We spent the  morning doing dry things like mini golf (they have 2 3D golf courses.  It is VERY HARD to golf 3D.  Seriously.  It is.  The kids also played in the arcade:

We had lunch (sandwiches again!) and then prepared to play in the water parks all night.  Little did we know what was going to happen.

Will was playing in the kiddie pool, so I told Bill to take Madison on the “big” slides.  Those slides required you to be a certain height, and Will isn’t that height.  He didn’t even notice they left.  However, they were back shortly.  When they came back, Madison’s next and chest were covered in blood.  (NOTE:  Remember that water mixed with blood mixed with a chin injury — well, it looks way worse than it is).

I calmly found a lifeguard and asked if we could get a band aid.  I’m a panicky person a lot, however, I was the calm one out of this situation.  The lifeguard was like let’s get to the first aid station.  Once they cleaned her up in there, it was bad but not as bad as you may have thought.  The first thing was that they asked us about 20 times what happened.  (I wasn’t with her.  I was in the kiddie pool so I had to find Bill.)  Basically, Bill and Madison had went down in a family raft.  They got to the bottom and lifeguard was holding the raft.  Bill jumped out one side, Madison the other.  However, Madison for some reason jumped in head first and sank right to the bottom.  She hit the bottom of the pool with her chin.  The lifeguard and Bill scooped her up.  She told Bill her chin hurt and he didn’t see anything besides it looked a little red.  At this point, I guess the lifeguard should have called the first aid guys to come (at least that’s what the first aid lifeguard people said).  Instead, Bill walked her to me, and in the short walk from one side of the water park (where they were) to where I was (the other side of the water park), she was covered in blood.  The first aid guy cleaned her up and looked at it several times.  He didn’t think it needed stitches but called his boss to come look at it.  The laceration is on the bottom of her chin.  His boss, the aquatic manager showed up and so did the resort manager.  (I’ll be honest — I was impressed how concerned they were.  I do think that this was a freak accident.)  After having I think 4 people take a look at her laceration, we all decided that it wasn’t deep enough for stitches and since it was the underside of her chin, I didn’t care if it scarred.  We did have to butterfly bandaid it.  I’m very proud of Madison — not once did she cry.  She did turn 4 shades of white though.  The resort manager gave us some passes for some of the dry activities in case she didn’t want to go back into the water.  I was also told to give the aquatic manager a call the rest of the night if we had any problems (we didn’t).  It was when we went to leave that I realized that Madison broke off part of her tooth.  A permanent one.  I asked and there was nothing we could do about it here, so we went back to the room (Madison didn’t want to go back into the water).  It was decided that we would order pizza.  While we were waiting, Will fell asleep eating Cheetos:

The best part is that he continued to eat said Cheetos in his sleep after I took the cup that had them in away.  He kept reaching down and putting invisible Cheetos into his mouth and chewing.  I think overtired would be a understatement.

Saturday morning rolled around, and Madison decided to go into the water again.  (Bill was understandably nervous).  However, she had no problems.  We went to first aid people and they helped me clean up Madison’s chin and rebandage it.  They also gave me more supplies for after swimming.

However, by Saturday, it was time to go home.  The kids were tired, we were tired.

Would we go back?  Yes!  I’m thinking about next year at the same time!