Day 22: Springfield

As I write this post, my kids and their cousin, Gage, are sitting next to each other on the couch playing their DS Lites. Seemed like an opportune moment to capitalize on the silence and write a couple of blog entries. The last couple of days have been pretty hectic and I've been too tired to write in the evenings.

Today we decided to get out of the house early to give Fred, my father-in-law, a chance to sleep in a quiet house. He works nights in a sleep lab and he arrived home at 7:30 am after his fourth night of work in five days. We packed all 5 cousins into my sister-in-law Shelley's car and Ron and I followed in ours. After switching the seating arrangements so that no siblings were next to each other, we were on our way to Belknap Springs and hopefully to the lava fields on McKenzie Pass. The rumor that the road to the lava fields was closed due to construction proved true, so we couldn't complete that leg of our journey. The Belknap Springs Resort was worth the drive, though. The gardens at the resort were beautiful and it was an idyllic location for a picnic lunch. The kids even got to burn some energy hiking around. We made another stop at one of the waterfalls on the McKenzie River before heading back to Springfield. The water at the falls was an unbelievable shade of pale aqua blue. It was practically fluorescent. The force of the falls was so great that you could feel the mist hundreds of feet away--Elli actually complained about getting wet in the 90 degree heat.

The highlight of the day, though, had to be taking the three older boys to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince late in the day. The kids have been playing Harry Potter almost non-stop since we arrived in Springfield. Fred and Mimi have a great collection of chopsticks that have been doing double duty as wands all week. We all enjoyed the movie and I recommend it to all Harry Potter fans. Definitely worth the money. Elli has definitely been bitten by the Harry Potter bug, too, so I'm going to start reading the series to her while we're here. Maybe we'll be finished with all 7 by the time the next movie opens in Nov. 2010 so she can see that one in the theatre...