On to Milwaukee

We got up the next morning and packed the car back up and headed to Milwaukee.   I thought the girls would enjoy watching the movie Bolt since it is about a puppy.  A few minutes after I turned it on, I heard a whimper from the back seat.  I looked back to see Sasha curled up in her car seat with her hands over her eyes and Leeza with her hands over her ears.  OOPS.  Mama forgot the first part of the movie has a chase seen where they are after the puppy dog.  After that, it was the Curious George DVD over and over again.

We met Abby and Jake for lunch, but poor little Jake was sick.  I later found out he was getting in 4 teeth and had a double ear infection.  No wonder he wasn't feeling good.  After lunch, we went to the waterpark at the new hotel. 

This slide was in the kiddie pool area.  The girls liked this slide and played a lot in this pool by jumping off the side into the pool.  It was about 1 ft deep.

They had fun climbing on the turtle and playing under the waterfall.

Then we went over to the big slides.  This slide is about 12 ft tall.  They had to climb 2 sets of concrete stairs with water running over them to get to the top.  Leeza fell down them twice since they were too small to use the handrail very well, but they went on this slide repeatedly for over an hour.  Finally they were so tired they were stumbling up the stairs so we called it a day.  They really loved the water.  Leeza was able to float a little by the time we were ready to leave, but Sasha tends to sink like a rock when I tried to get her to float.  There were 2 slides bigger than this, but you had to be able to swim to use them so this was the largest slide they were allowed on. 

Later that night, we went to the first official Kazapalooza event.  It was held at a childrens museum.  They didn't have enough tables to eat on and there were way too many kids for the size of the museum(Decatur has a much better children's museum and it is 1/10 the size of Milwaukee).  Finally, Abby dragged us back to a corner the mob had not found yet and the girls were able to play and have some fun.  I also met a couple of nice families there so it was fun in the end.  Leeza loved this little lawn mower and would not let go of it.  When she wanted to go down the slide, she dragged the lawn mower up the stairs with her and took it down the slide with her. 

Sasha loved playing with the sand table and spent a lot of time here. 

I had to take a picture of them sleeping.  They were so adorable.  They did really good sleeping in the big girl bed.  No one fell out until the last night and then Leeza slept in the center of the bed so Sasha had only a little bit of bed to sleep on and she fell out 3 times.  Sasha woke up at 5am as usual, but this time she had someone next to her to try to wake up.  One morning, I woke up to see Sasha pounding on Leeza chest saying "get up Leeza" repeatedly.  Poor Leeza needs all the sleep she can get.  She slept right through the pounding and just quietly said "stop it Sasha".    I turned the TV on to some cartoon and she watched them until we all got up at 6:30am. 
There was a luncheon the next day.  We sat with another family that had adopted from Shymkent.  Hannah has just been home for a few months.

This is our Shymkent group- Abby and Jake, me and the girls, and Erin and Hannah. 

We spent the afternoon at the waterpark again and then packed up and headed home the next day.  5 1/2 hours of the same Curious George video!  The girls did good.  Leeza slept a lot. As long as I gave Sasha a new toy or a treat every half hour, she was fine.  We stopped by a McDonalds for lunch that had a play area, but it was so hot that they did not want to play on it so we packed up and drove on.  Overall, they did wonderfully and we all had a good time.