Whole Family Going To Grandma’s Birthday
May 9, 2008
Today, we decided to go ahead take the whole family to my Grandmother’s 90th Birthday parties. We had been contemplating whether just I should go or the whole family should go.
When we first started looking at the trip, tickets were running pretty high. I have a couple of tickets I could get on miles, but two additional tickets was still going to run close to a $1000. That is, until I looked today.
While perusing the American Airlines website, I noticed they had fares that served our needs for $248 (plus tax). Wow, I haven’t gotten a ticket that cheap in a long time. We decided to go ahead and purchase four tickets and save my miles. We are hoping to have enough for four tickets for our 2009 cruise which isn’t even planned yet.
The kids haven’t seen Great Grandma in many years and being that this is her 90th Birthday, they may not have many more opportunities which also weighed heavy in our decision. The kids will be excited as they don’t know yet and really wanted to go.
A lot of my extended family will also be coming in and it will be an opportunity to see relatives I haven’t seen in years – almost an extended family reunion of sorts. We are planning to spend the whole weekend there with Birthday parties planned for two of the nights.
We still need to arrange accommodations and perhaps transportation, but those are the easy parts. This should be a great family trip!
Bandera, TX – Part IV Water Park and Board Games
April 2, 2008
Finally, on Wednesday of our trip, we had a warm enough day to utilize the water park. They opened up the water park for a few weeks in November and then opened it again this spring. The park features a children’s splash area with bubbly fountains, slides and a huge bucket that fills and dumps out. It also has a small wave pool, a lily pad / monkey bars cross walk, a volley ball pool and a lazy river. The kids took turns on the slides, the cross walk, while the Moms mostly did the lazy river. They never did run the wave pool while we were in the pool, but did have it running on Saturday when we first arrived at the complex. Our only major complaint was that they didn’t seem to running enough water down the major slide so we all got stuck about half way down.
Now to completely change the subject, we played quite a few board games during the week. One of the first we played was Cruise IQ on Sunday night. We played the kids and I against Grandmother and Grandpop. This was quite fun because all of us love to cruise. There was one question that came up in the trivia game that had us all laughing. The question was “Music from the Norteno region of Mexico most closely resembles: Salsa, Tango, or Polka”. We all had a big laugh because after attending mass at the Polish church, we talked about how the Mexicans adopted the polka music of the Polish, Germans, and Czechs that settled in Southern Texas. We knew this because we, the Klasens, all performed Mexican Norteno Polkas in the Showstopper Dance Competition this year. Too funny. The next game we played was Kismet. This is a fun game to play with kids because it is about 90% luck and 10% strategy. That makes for a fun game with kids because all ages have a nearly equal chance of winning. Savannah was thrilled to be the youngest player and the winner.
I wish I could say that my other favorite game to play was as kid friendly as Kismet. The game I really loved playing was Balderdash. In this game, you can excel if you are really good at “BS”. To play the “dasher” reads an unusual word from a card out loud. Then the other players write down made up definitions of that word on their note sheet, while the “dasher” writes the true definition. Everyone turns in their sheet to the dasher who mixes them up and reads all the definitions out loud. The players then have to pick the one that they think is the true definition. The Dasher wins points if no one guesses the true definition. The other players get points by either guessing the correct answer or having others guess their bluff. This game is definitely quite a bit of fun if you have enough adults playing to provide a wide assortment of believable bluffs. You can also imagine that some of the definitions had us all cracked up. We probably had the most fun playing when it was Steve, Anne, Brett, Mary Fran, David, and Sean playing together on Sunday night. I was glad to say that I was the best “BS”er in the group and won the game that night. When we played with just the girls one morning, Savannah got a little frustrated because her bluffs weren’t so believable and she wasn’t so good at guessing the correct answer. I have to say that as far as family reunions are concerned, board games are one of the best ways to bring everyone together, laugh and have fun.
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