When Ellie was two she found Peter Pan’s Flight at Disney World unacceptably terrifying. We wanted to ride it as a family for our last ride on the trip, and tried bargaining with her. She announced that she would go on the ride if she could get “Princess Ears.” Having seen the princess style Mickie Mouse ears at various shops around the park all week, we okayed this deal. Exiting the ride, Ellie was SO EXCITED to go get her Princess Ears. We marched right on over to the nearest mouse ear kiosk, and presented Ellie with her reward.
Only there had been a terrible mistake. By “Princess Ears” Ellie had meant PIERCED ears, not a stupid hat.
She told us that we were the worst. We told HER that she should learn better English.
Pictures of Ellie telling all about the pirates in Peter Pan’s Flight and running off to get her some Princess Ears:
Well, Ellie’s wait for Princess Ears finally ended. We had decided that she could have her ears pierced during her First Communion year. We were all set to get them pierced in May, but Ellie learned earlier this month of the “you can’t wear different earrings for the first month” rule when her friend got her ears pierced. Ellie explained that she had been hoping to wear my lucky earrings for her first communion. This touched all the soft gooey places of my heart because she has always been very sweet about my lucky earrings. So instead of having to wait until May, she got to get her ears pierced in March. Well played, Eloise. The princess ears game finally played out in your favor.
We went to a local tattoo/piercing parlor since that is the current recommendation over the kind of mall places I went for my ear piercing. Benefits are reportedly lower infection rates and a better piercing since a needle is used versus a “blunt trauma” piercing gun.
Pens and Needles is the piercing shop in Colorado Springs that has the most word-of-mouth for little girl ear piercing, and so that was our choice (and how perfect is that name?!). Taking kids to a pediatrician is also a good option for those concerned about infection. I ultimately chose a piercing place over a pediatrician since they do more piercings and theoretically could have more expertise in piercing (as an added bonus they also charged less than the local pediatricians).
I was pleased with the overall experience, and to date Ellie’s piercings have been infection free and look great. One of the unexpected benefits of using a tattoo parlor was seeing her have sweet interactions with people with piercings and gauges and facial tattoos. She would not have had that at the pediatrician!
Tips for first time piercers:
You may want to make an appointment to make sure your little one isn’t sitting nervously with a long wait: Pens and Needles only has their piercer for kiddos present on Saturdays (at least at the time we made our appointment).
You’ll need to bring your child’s birth certificate as well as your ID.
The piercings at Pens and Needles are bar bell style piercings (like you would see in someone’s pierced tongue) versus the kind of posts and backs I’d always seen with earrings. I think this makes them slightly more comfortable at night and more secure (though I started tightening Ellie’s every morning after I got a call from her school one afternoon after one back fell out and the teacher didn’t know how to put it back on).
When you select an earring you aren’t just selecting the size of the gem, but the size of the post and therefore the size of the piercing hole. The smaller the number, the larger the hole. Ellie chose a medium sized gem, which was a 16 gauge. I didn’t make the connection that this was the gauge of the post size. A more common size for an ear piercing would be 18-20. I felt awful when I first discovered this, because not only did it make for a more painful piercing, but I was worried that her holes would be too large for standard sized earrings. More research revealed this not to be the case, and some even recommend a 16 gauge over smaller because they better accommodate different earing widths and won’t look stretched out. But I do think it made the piercing more painful for her (she was uncomfortable for that whole first day, which I don’t remember after getting my ears pierced).
Pre-medicate! I felt guilty for not thinking to toss some Advil at her an hour before the piercing.
And my final tip: DO NOT coincidentally allow your child to hold an electric guitar for the first time on the very same day she visits a tattoo parlor:
Monday, March 19, 2018
Posted in kids
For Ellie’s 8th birthday party we threw a Spa Birthday at home. She loved it, and I think it will be a theme we likely revisit when she is older!
Party Favors: The biggest plan-ahead part of this party are the spa robes. These make a surprisingly affordable party favor at $3.75 each as long as you have at least a month to allow for shipping from China. I purchased mine from this ebay seller, but there are many different ones to choose from on ebay.
I also made little makeup pouches for the girls using this perfect fabric (the blue is now out of print). They are loosely based on the Cash and Carry pattern, but are unlined, the sizing is different, and they are made only of one fabric (basically I use the pattern as a tutorial for putting in the zipper). The girls also got to take home their crafts (placed inside the makeup pouch).
Activities: We made bath bombs, lip scrub, and lip gloss. I was very glad to have Nic’s help for the craft portion. The older girls (5th and 6th graders) had an easier time than my younger second graders, so don’t try to do this with young ones if you don’t have an extra set of hands!
For the bath bombs we used this recipe (funnily enough, even though I had googled recipes I ended up finding a recipe from someone I knew in my scrapbooking days–I got to do a few sample pages for her book). For supplies, I used these molds and kid-friendly scents from Amazon as well as this citric acid. Everything else I picked up at the grocery store. I was nervous that the bath bombs wouldn’t fizzle and would be a bust, but they worked out really well. We even hid rings in the center of them so they would have a bath bomb surprise.
The lip scrub and lip gloss were based in coconut oil, with a little almond oil thrown in. The lip scrub had brown sugar for its scrubbing base and for the lip gloss we used koolaid for color/flavor. To hold the lip scrub and lip gloss, I got these little containers.
Along with the crafts, we also had face masks and pedicures set up. The girls paired off so that one could receive her pedicure while the other girl did the pedicure. This foot scrub made them all giggle and squirm.
Some of the biggest hits were the hot lemon-scented cloths and the punch. I bought a bunch of cheap white washcloths and put them in the crockpot with water and lemon essential oil. The girls loved them!
Treats: The punch was delicious. Orange and pineapple sorbet, fresca, and frozen pineapple and lime juices with lemon slices.
The cake is based off one I found on Pinterest. It’s two cakes baked in 8″ round cake pans fitted together (you’ll slice a section off one of the cakes so it nests against the other). We used two tubs of white frosting and dyed one of them pink. We dragged a fork through the towel for texture and then added sprinkles for texture (I think the sprinkles made a huge difference in ‘selling’ the towel portion of the cake). My big recommendation is to wait until the last minute to place the cucumbers on the cake. Even though I dried the cucumber slices, over the two hours between making the cake and serving the cake, the cucumbers began to weep and it looked like our spa lady was crying. 🙂
We used these marshmallow and tootsie roll nail polish treats for our centerpiece and they were both adorable AND easy (Ellie made most of them)! Spray marshmallows with water, roll in sprinkles and set aside. Poke a toothpick halfway into the center of a mini tootsie roll and then place the marshmallow on the other half of the toothpick. Voila!
As I recover from years of nursing school, I have lots of old projects to share! Up first is this Christmas hat I knit from the Amy Miller Donder and Blitzen pattern.
This is meant to be a two color pattern, but I immediately saw it in red, green, and white using the Barefoot in the Park colorway from The Plucky Knitter in primo worsted (“primo worsted” seems to be called “primo dk” now) that had arrived at my doorstep as a surprise subscription colorway (about a million years ago). I tracked down a red to go with it (Peep Toes from The Plucky Knitter) on Ravelry from a fellow knitter, and then had to find a white. A real white is HARD to find with Plucky, so eventually I gave up and purchased a white in a similar weight at a local shop.
This pattern is meant to be knit as a two color fair isle pattern and it would have been much better had I not made the hearts red in terms of ease of knitting and tension. The hearts make for some very long carries and initially I was worried about how the hat would work out, but blocking made all my fears go away (although some of the hearts are a little wonky in shape). I also am not sure why I decided to have one of the zig-zags be white and the other red. In retrospect I would change that, too, as it makes me a little crazy looking at the photos. Oh well.
Some pattern notes that aren’t colorwork related–this ends up being a very long hat. I would probably be tempted to make the brim a little shorter than called for and maybe get rid of a couple of lines of the pattern (maybe a line of polka dots from top and bottom?). I also find that this is a really loose hat on my head, and would do 2×2 ribbing versus 1×1 to help correct that next time. (Someone told me this would make it tighter, but I don’t know for sure that that is true.)
For all my sizing and color choice concerns, though, this hat is probably the most complimented thing I have ever made. Multiple loved ones have hinted that they would either like this very hat or an exact replica (alas this was a labor of love I am not likely to repeat thanks to those long carries!) and a stranger even stopped me in REI to tell me that he liked my hat! So if you do unwisely tackle this hat in three colors, you will at least be well complimented after! 😀
Last week I received my diploma from Western Governors University for my BSN, finally completing this path that I started just shy of seven years ago. (That sounds crazy, but I looked it up and I took my very first pre-req in the summer of 2011.)
When I proposed going back to school to become a nurse to Nic, I proposed a slow and steady plan that would have me not even starting nursing school proper until Ellie was in kindergarten. Fast forward six years and the ‘slow and steady to RN’ plan was now an ‘all out sprint to the finish let’s get this done, RN to BSN program completed in one single term’ plan. Started slow and steady, ended fast and furious!
This latest program was by far the easiest and least painful part of my nursing school experience. I started the RN to BSN program on the 1st of December 2017, and my last assignment was graded and I was officially done with the program on February 23rd 2018. For those counting, that means I completed the program in less than three months! I took two weeks off at Christmas and another week off when a family member was hospitalized. Which means this really took just two months! And even better, I got my BSN without a single group project or forum post! With my hospital’s tuition reimbursement of $3000/year, the degree cost me $800 (books included!). Compared to the emotionally draining and logistically exhausting Associates Degree, this was particularly delightful.
For those poking around the internet looking for tips on completing the Western Governors University RN to BSN program in one term or those deciding which RN to BSN program to go with, I’ve decided to add my own experience to the mix since it was information shared by others that allowed me to realize that this was possible. So if you are hoping to be a fellow “One and Done”-er, read on–hopefully I can give back a little this way! 😀
While in my second semester of nursing school and loathing the dual enrollment RN to BSN program I was enrolled in, I discovered that it would be possible to finish the RN to BSN program in one term at WGU when I read this blog post from Momma Maven.
Realizing that I could earn my BSN in 6 months for $3800 instead of the 18 month $20k slog at my local university, I asked the director of the units where I was hoping to work if she cared where my BSN came from. The answer was a big fat no. I immediately disenrolled from the dual enrollment program with a plan to wait to start the RN to BSN program until I was eligible for WGU (unlike dual enrollment programs, you cannot enroll at WGU until you have your RN license in hand). My plan was to start immediately after graduation and finish in one term, putting my BSN graduation in December 2017 (which would have been my graduating date from the dual enrollment program).
After starting in my new RN position, though, I found being a new nurse to be more emotionally taxing than I had expected, and decided to delay my start at WGU for a few months. My date was set because of some tuition reimbursement details, and I started the program on December 1st. December would not be my first choice of a starting month due to the holidays, but there were some tuition reimbursement details that made December an important start date. Thanks for the flexibility of the program I was able to take the second half of December off for travel and holiday festivities without any problem. With my first degree (BA in English) and the coursework I had taken when I planned to go to an accelerated BSN program before learning that Associates Degrees are an option for becoming a nurse, I had enough transfer credits to only need 33 credits at WGU.
One of the best parts of WGU is that it is self-paced. If you want to take two weeks off for Christmas, you can. If you want to knock out three classes in two days, you can do that, too. When a family emergency requiredus to travel out of town, I told my mom how grateful I was to be enrolled at WGU. I could take the week off unexpectedly and unceremoniously. There were no deadlines I had to wrestle with, no forum posts or replies to worry about– I just got to press “pause” on the schoolwork and not worry about it for a week. This alone is priceless and a great reason to consider WGU!
With all of the good, though, comes some frustrations and confusion. Here are a couple of things I found confusing early on that I would have loved to have a guide for:
- WGU terminology.
- SM is your ‘Student Mentor.’ They are your guidance counselor and are in charge of your progress in the program—they will approve you to open tests, open classes, determine the order of your courses, and call you weekly to check on your progress. Weekly. When I first learned that I would have to talk to someone WEEKLY I balked. “Umm…I am a grownup who sets and achieves her own goals all the time,” my insulted whiny baby self said. But then I quickly noticed how very productive I was the night before a phone call with my mentor and changed my tune! These phone calls are easy and fast. Just five minute or less these are little check-ins on what you’ve done and what you want to do next. Don’t sweat them.
- CM is your ‘Course Mentor.’ To be honest I only ever reached out to a course mentor once and they didn’t even answer my question. I discovered that most people also had negative experiences with the course mentors. These are supposed to be the subject experts on the various classes (similar to a professor)…but if you have a question about an assignment you are probably going to get a faster and more straight forward answer from a Facebook support group.
- OAs and PAs and PAs and OAs. This is probably the worst of the acronyms because PA either means Performance Assessment, referring to a paper or video or other non-test-based graded task, or Pre-Assessment, meaning the pretest before you can open the OA (Objective Assessment).
- Is the OA like the PA? On every Facebook support group you will find people asking if the OAs and PAs are similar. Constantly. And here is the thing: THE ANSWER IS YES. Ignore the crazies who say they are not. There are constant horror stories about people who did well on the PA but bombed the OA. I strongly believe that if that was the case, they either had nerves get the better of them, or they didn’t take the time to read their PA report and quickly study up on the sections they did poorly on.
- The number of due items listed for a course versus the actual number of tasks you will complete. For every class you can see little circles next to the course with the number of PAs, OAs, or both required in the course. So you might see two little PA bubbles. “Great!” you think. “Two papers!” Only one of the PAs may actually be composed of three “tasks” which are three papers. In another class one PA really is one paper. There seems to be zero rhyme or reason to this business. Just role with it and every time it starts to make you twitch repeat to yourself “at least it’s not a group project, at least it’s not a group project, at least it’s not a group project.”
The worst part of WGU is the inconsistency. Not only is WGU constantly changing things, but your experience is largely controlled by your Student Mentor, and each one varies in their enforcement and understanding of “the rules.” For example, many people strongly recommend opening the fieldwork course (C229) as soon as humanly possible and keeping that open so that you can earning your fieldwork hours while you work on other courses. My Student Mentor (while lovely and encouraging and a great student mentor) wouldn’t let me open C229 until I had completed all but it and one other class, and I was only allowed to have one class open at a time (with the exception of the initial webinar based class).
My recommendation is to emotionally prepare to be extremely flexible, work with the things you can’t change, and work around the things you’re able to work around. For example, though I was unable to open that final class while earning my field hours, I was able to “preview” the assignments for the final class. This allowed me to write parts of those final two assignments before I officially opened the course.
WGU makes frequent changes to the classes. Some are in your favor, and some are against you. For example on January 1st they rolled out a change increasing the required fieldwork hours for community health from 45 to 65. At the same time, the dreaded health assessment requirements were scaled back from something like 80 to something like 60. You win some, you lose some. One of Momma Maven’s tips is to not freak out about the changes. This is very good advice. Don’t stress it—you can still finish in plenty of time to only pay one term of tuition.
That said, keeping up to date on rumors about course changes through facebook support groups can help you make the most of the situation. The week of Christmas I learned about the fieldwork requirement change from the facebook support groups (they were positively blowing up with posts about it). Rumor had it that if you could enroll in (some said just enroll, some said complete) the course that is tied to the fieldwork course (C228) before January 1st, you would be grandfathered into the old hour requirements. This was the only issue I pushed back against with my Student Mentor when she initially told me no. I pushed back when she said that I couldn’t enroll in the class (gently and respectfully) since I knew for a fact that others were getting into the old version of C228, and she acquiesced. Facebook to the rescue. I guess Facebook owed me 20 hours after all the hours it has mindlessly sucked from my life. 😛
The fast finisher method: The ‘one and done’ method for finishing WGU in one term focuses on the fact that this is a competency based program, not a traditional program. Therefore the focus is on completing the competencies versus going through all of the coursework in the class in a linear way. With each class the ‘one and done’ers start with the tasks and then go back to read material that you need to complete the paper or test. (The exception to this biochemistry, where you’ll actually want to watch the cohort videos before attempting the pre-test.)
Facebook support groups (in particular the WGU BSN and MSN Balls to the Wall Group) were invaluable resources for up-to-date tips on the courses [update June 2018 – my favorite support group is unfortunately closed currently to new members]. With the courses changing so quickly, specific tips that are helpful now may not be applicable in 6 months. Keeping that in mind, here are my general thoughts and tips about each class:
C820 Professional Leadership and Communication for Healthcare – This is the only class you actually have firm timelines for, as you have to attend 8 two hour webinars. I signed up for one of the sessions that allowed you to complete two sessions per day with the four days close together instead of having the 8 sessions spread out over several weeks A little bit fluffy, this class is your chance to ‘meet’ other WGU students. There are rules about how you attend these classes (professional attire, not allowed to call in from your bed [which is a disappointment for those of us attending the classes between night shifts!]), and a lot of silly little homework tasks, but overall less terrible than I expected. This took me a week to complete based on the way my classes were scheduled.
C785 Biochemistry – This was my favorite class. I had taken a general college chemistry course four-ish years ago that provided a good background. I watched the five prerecorded cohort videos, took the quiz on each module that was in the Course Material, took the pre-assessment, brushed up on the questions I missed, and then took the test. Took 5 days and I scored an “excellent” on the exam. One of my best tips for this class (and any WGU class where you are watching a video) is to turn up the speed to 1.5 or 1.75. In the lower right of the window you’ll see a 1x—click on that and you can speed up or slow down the video. In high school my history teacher told me that if I was reading the same paragraph again and again and not retaining it, I should read FASTER, not slower. In speeding up the delivery my brain would be forced to focus on the content and big ideas versus getting hung on up on the language. I think this is true of the biochemistry videos, too. The course mentors speak slowly in them, but this ends up giving you too much time to become distracted as they talk. Speeding up the videos may actually make them easier to understand.
C475 Care of the Older Adult – This is a class you can complete in a day. Take the pretest cold, check on anything you didn’t do well on (most likely the Medicare/Medicaid stuff), and take the test. The other test you take on an external site was also very easy.
C361 Evidence Based Practice and Applied Nursing Research – This was a hard one to slog through, in large part because it was my first paper class and I wasn’t sure what to expect from WGU paper assignments. The truth is that at WGU you don’t write actual papers, but a series of short answer questions that happen to be together in one document. You will repeat yourself constantly on these two papers, but get used to that—there are many assignments that seem to ask the same question over and over again. You don’t have to pretend that you aren’t saying the same thing over and over again–you can literally cut and paste your own work from an earlier paragraph in some assignments. Watch the library video one or two times before looking for articles to make sure you get the right type of papers for each assignment. It may be tempting to pick a topic that you are actually interested in for Task 2, but don’t fall for that trap. 😛 You need so many articles and such specific types of articles that it is difficult to find that on any topic of current interest. The dead horses are the topics to pick on this one. (I chose skin to skin after cesarean section.)
C349 Health Assessment – You’ll do a virtual assessment on “Tina” (typing in questions and clicking on various parts of her) as well as an actual video assessment on a real adult human (no using your own kiddos). The video assessment is not like the one you did in nursing school. You get to have the rubric with you and refer to it for the entire assessment—this is fully open book in that regard. Tip for Tina—if you type in a question and it doesn’t quite know what you’re asking, it will pop up a box with several questions that it thinks you might be getting at. Select the one you meant, but remember the other questions that were options, and then ask those, too.
C787 Health and Wellness through Nutritional Science – You can do this class in an afternoon if you can get your SM to approve both the PA and OA quickly enough. This is basic nutrition that you probably covered in the nutrition course you had to take during nursing school.
C468 Information Management and the Application of Technology – This is similar to nutrition in that it can be completed in a day. Take the pretest to identify areas of weakness, brush up on those, and then take the test.
C489 Organizational Systems and Quality Leadership – This is more time consuming than it looks. One of the tasks is actually a series of many lessons with quizzes at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. DON’T SKIP OVER THE COURSE SURVEYS at the end of each lesson. If you do, you’ll have to go back and do them all at once in order to receive your certificate of completion. It’s easy to get bogged down in the sheer quantity of mini lessons and quizzes in the IHI task. Just start knocking them off a few at a time and you’ll be done in no time.
C304 Professional Roles and Values – This is the nursing theory course. I used the textbook for this class more than in any other course, pulling the nursing theories and theorists from the textbook.
C228 Community Health and Population-Focused Nursing — This is probably the weirdest of the courses. There are two simulations, one about a disease outbreak, and the other a scenario in which you tour around a virtual town and sleuth out information that relates to the community’s health. The windshield assessment will have you go to specific locations in the simulation, but you also have to do some meandering to find things like the broken sewage pipe. Many of the things that are supposed to seem obvious in the simulation aren’t (like the white stuff in the air that many of us blew off as snow is actually air pollution). Lean heavily on things people have already identified about the simulation in the facebook support group—there are a lot of clues there and things you would necessarily pick up on (like air pollution that looks like snow).
C229 Community Health and Population-Focused Nursing Field Experience – I expected this to be the worst of the courses, but Evidence Based Practice was much worse. I chose obesity prevention as my topic for hours, which made finding ways to get hours incredibly easy. I saw the best post on one of the facebook support groups that read “Some people say that you should pick something you’re passionate about. I’m passionate about finishing this program, and so I chose obesity prevention.” My site assessments included the WIC and SNAP office, parks (suburban and urban), schools (rural , urban, suburban), Boy Scout meeting, water park, arcade/bowling center, zoo, mall, breastfeeding support group, grocery stores (bulk items, rural store, high end suburban store, and two grocery stores from the same chain but one in a high income and one in a low income area), local trails, restaurants, hospital cafeteria (during the day and then at night), gyms, neighborhood planning meeting, rural convenience store, and REI. My interviews included a social worker, lactation consultant, occupational health nurse, and rural school district nurse. I notified a lot of people asking on facebook about the five hour interview limit. It is important to note that the five hour limit applies to ordinary yahoos. This means you can interview your friends/family/neighbors for their take on the issue. WGU wants you to have lots of interviews with actual subject matter experts–there is no limit on those interviews (social workers, lactation consultants, etc).
C493 Leadership and Professional Image – For most people this is the last class they tackle, and it really does reach the pinnacle of repetitive nonsense. My greatest wish when I was working on the portfolio was that I had worked on it as I went. The portfolio requires you to talk about the things you learned and the papers you wrote, and filling in those sections as you completed the relevant classes instead of months later would make that much easier. I found this portfolio example to be very helpful as I tried to figure out which classes and tasks they were expecting you to reference in various sections.
Best of luck to anyone tackling this degree–I hope it will be as good an experience for you as it was for me! I will be back at WGU once my tuition reimbursement resets for an MSN!
If you have an elementary school student, you are no doubt aware that March 2nd is Dr Seuss’s birthday. I have long planned to use the leftovers from my nieces’ baby quilts (link) for a Analise patchwork skirt from Portabella Pixie for Ellie to wear during the Dr Seuss festivities (which were limited to one day at our old school but get a whole five days at Ellie’s new elementary school). The last two years were too busy with nursing school, but since my last assignment for my BSN was graded on Friday, I had no excuse not to get it done this year!
This is NOT a project to start at 9:30pm. Not that anyone would do that. But if someone WERE to start this project at 9:30pm the night before Cat in the Hat Day, I can tell you that they would probably finish around 3am (which includes cutting out pattern pieces). A 6 hour skirt makes this a very labor intensive garment. And since I hate gathering, it was quite the labor of love.
It takes a TON of fabric. I couldn’t believe how much fabric this skirt sucked up, or the large pieces it requires. Since Ellie instantly fell in love with the twirl power of the skirt, I think I see this becoming a quick stash-buster! (When I asked if she would like other skirts like this, she announced with a twirl “I want a MILLION like this!”)
Pattern alterations: I skipped the ruffle on this and just rolled hem finished the bottom tier. I may do the ruffle later, but it was 3am and the skirt was definitely long enough. I didn’t follow the fabric number assignments for the pattern pieces since I was having to work with the fabric amounts I had. There is no way to see at a glance which pattern pieces will but up against one another, which means you just have to take the fabric combos that happen. Oh well.
Pattern notes: It looks like this pattern is out of print, but it is still kicking around ebay if you didn’t pick it up while it was in print. This is a long skirt with plenty of growing room. The pattern only goes to size 8 (which is the size I made this newly 8 year old girl), but I can see taking the waistband elastic out when Ellie outgrows the waist of the skirt and just putting in longer elastic to make it last all of her Dr Seuss Day elementary school years.
Fabric notes: Most of these prints were originally out several years ago, but the Dr Seuss line seems to be a perennial and you can still get most of these exact prints and new Dr Seuss options (here are the Fabric.com offerings).
The local Ghost Hotel across from our local Ghost Mall was finally bought and developed this year…by Great Wolf Lodge! I had heard occasional things about the Great Wolf Lodge in Washington, and so I was excited to check one out. We reserved a room this fall before they opened at 30% off for two weeks after they opened their doors. Here are my thoughts and tips based on our experience celebrating our kids’ 7th and 11th birthdays there with a one night stay.
The room:
We paid an extra $30 for a ‘themed room’ which was a massive hit with the kids (Junior Wolf Pup Den Suite). They love hotel rooms, especially suites, so having a little alcove all to themselves with bunk beds and a tv was HUGE. I had read reviews online that recommended skipping this upgrade since many families don’t spend much time in their room, but for our family the extra expense added a big wow factor.
The rooms have mini fridges, so bring adult beverages, I mean snacks. They have a microwave, so don’t forget the microwave popcorn for an evening treat! The coffee makers use k-cups, so you can bring your own favorite k-cup from home (or go down to Dunkin Donuts).
One thing that the room didn’t have that was a small disappointment was a DVD player. Nic and I had looked forward to catching up on some movies, but without a DVD player we had to watch live television like it was 2003 or something.
While I’m nit-picking, the bed was ridiculously uncomfortable. The mattress was way too soft. Be prepared to wake up feeling 97 years old.
And back to the positives: The bathroom had shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel as well as a hair oil treatment, which was a nice touch after a day in chlorine! And did I mention that my kids completely loved the themed room? (Ignore my awkward editing. I should really stick to photos.)
Check-in officially begins at 1pm. We arrived at 12:45 and our room was ready for us and there was no wait to check-in. Definitely arrive a touch early for check-in if you can! Not only do you get a little longer in the park, but you are first in line for the rooms that are already clean, and you beat the line for check-in (and more importantly the line for the elevators)!
At check-in I asked if it would be possible to have a late check-out. Since they were fully booked on Friday I wasn’t able to get a 2 hour late check-out, but I did get a complimentary 1 hour late check-out (putting our check-out at noon) which was especially great because it kept us out of the elevator congestion occurring with the 11am check-outs!
The waterpark:
The waterpark is really what everyone is there for. You can’t get a day pass–it is only for guests. We stayed Thursday night into Friday and while Friday was certainly more crowded than Thursday, neither day felt overly crowded. We lucked out both times and got chairs easily–the first day arriving at the waterpark about 5pm and on Friday getting there about 11am. You aren’t able to bring food/beverages into the waterpark area, but you can eat your own food in an area right outside the waterpark.
The hotel has lockers that you can use on Thursday before checking into your room and on Friday after checking out. THEY ARE THE MOST EXPENSIVE LOCKERS IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD. A tiny locker that won’t fit a purse will set you back $10, a locker that will fit a standard beach bag is $15 and a locker that will fit your beach bag and shoes is $20. We had set ourselves up on Friday to use a locker, but if I’d known how pricey they would be I would have planned to leave a bag of clothing at our chairs and gotten a $10 locker for my camera. (If you have a DSLR the lockers are nice so that you can take a couple of ‘real pictures’ and then stash away your camera, otherwise you can probably skip the lockers. Nic and I have inexpensive android/windows phones which we felt perfectly comfortable leaving at the pool chairs.)
If you’re used to Villa Splash, the first thing you’ll notice about Great Wolf Lodge is that the waterpark is much colder than the steamy paradise you’re used to. While the temperature was fine if you were staying active and rushing around between the different slides, if you were damp and standing around waiting for kids, it was not so pleasant. There has been much talk on local forums about the lack of a hot tub (which would help the temperature issue a lot) as well as the lack of a lazy river. I love a lazy river, so the lack of one was a bummer.
I thought that the range of slides and activities for different age groups was fantastic. There were several slides for smaller kids, and lots for them to do in the splash area. For toddlers and babies there was also a fenced-off area with very small slides and shallow water. For older kids and adults there is a nice range of slides ranging from my idea to fun to my idea of completely terrifying. I could tell that my fifth grader wasn’t sure if he was going to be Too Cool for it all or not, but running into two of his buddies from school in the lobby when we checked in and getting to spend Thursday evening playing with them in the waterpark sold him on it being Perfectly Cool Enough for a 5th grader.
Quick overview of the different slides:
- Alberta Falls was my favorite slide and the one with the longest line. It is your best bet for starting young or timid kids off on the bigger slides. You can use a double or single innertube, which is perfect so that you can happy voice “wheee!” for your tiny companion and make sure they’re doing okay. It starts off with a dramatic drop and then is mild before another little dip and then calm twists and turns. This is one of the tube slides that you can see from outside the hotel.
- Mountain Edge Raceway is a toboggan style ride where riders slide down on their tummies and race against other sliders. While you can see the last part of the slide from the main waterpark area, the first part of the ride takes you outside the building in isolated tubes (you won’t see any of your fellow racers). We had taken our first grader on this as her first slide and as the slide began I thought “OH NO SHE MUST BE TERRIFIED!” but thankfully as we emerged onto the exposed portion of the slide I was able to look back and see a giant smile. It’s a little more intense than it looks from below, though, so have young sliders go on the splash area slides first to warm up (and preferably Alberta Falls next). Since four people load at a time, the line for this was never long.
- Howlin Tornado is the slide that broke our first grader’s desire to go on any of the slides. This is a family ride in a giant innertube, but it is intense. (Disclaimer: I’m kind of a chicken. Splash Mountain is scary to me.) I had the misfortune of riding it backward my first time, and spent the entire time thinking “THIS WAS A BIG MISTAKE” as Ellie and I tied for freaking out and being miserable on the ride. She was sobbing by the end of it and kept saying that she was so scared during the ride that she couldn’t breathe. If you have a chicken in your group, it’s not worth it to convince them to go. And if you DO convince them to go, ensure that they are facing forward! The tube tends to twist around toward the end, but the initial part of the ride has all the steep drops, which are particularly unpleasant when you can’t see where you are going and feel like the people at the opposite end of your tube are going to fall down on top of you. (Will rode backward when I tried it for the second time and he kept shouting at me “MOM HOLD ON!” because he also experienced the delights of feeling like the people opposite you were definitely going to fall down on top of you.)
- Wolf Tail is the infamous slide in which you enter a tube and then they drop the floor out from under you and you freefall 20 feet before looping around and finishing the adventure. As if that wasn’t enough, they amp up the anticipatory fear by playing a heartbeat inside the tube when you enter, and then counting down from three…only to add an extra beat onto the end of the countdown so you don’t even know when you will really drop! Nic and Will both rode it twice. Nic described it as horrible torture after riding it once, and then ended up being talked into going on it a second time when he escorted Will up for Will’s second ride. Bragging rights seem to be the sole purpose of going on this ride.
Great Wolf Lodge provides one towel per guest which you check in and out like a highly regulated narcotic. Remember that you can trade in your wet towels for fresh dry ones whenever you want, though!
They also provide both lifejackets and the ‘puddle jumpers‘ most moms use for non-swimmers. Using the ones on-hand instead of dealing with your own is nice.
There is a bar in the waterpark area (the Sangria pitchers seemed to be the best deal) as well as a place for food. On Friday we got lunch there since I didn’t want to take the time to get dressed and leave the waterpark. It was our only experience eating inside the park and it wasn’t a great one. They were sold out of several items (including the giant ice cream bucket I’d wanted to surprise the kids with) and after selling us sodas we went to fill the cups only to discover that basically everything except diet sprite was sold out. Not cool. The food was fine, and pricing what you would expect inside a waterpark–lunch for the four of us was about $40.
Magiquest:
Since my kiddos are big into video games, I knew Magiquest would be something we’d want to try. To play the game for four days is $15, and the wands are an additional $20.If the kids hadn’t mastered the game while we were there, we could have come back to have them finish it on Saturday or Sunday.
Wands range in price by $6 from the most basic to the most fancy-looking, and my kids agreed to pay the difference so they could have the coolest looking wand. I’d told them ahead of time that there are wand toppers, but these aren’t a good value since people say it adds to the weight of the wand in an uncomfortable way. Since we’d talked about it ahead of time, they weren’t even tempted by the toppers. I spent some time in the months leading up to the trip trying to find used wands on ebay for a good price, but they seem to hold their value too well to make buying used on ebay a good option (they are all $15-$25 used with shipping, which really doesn’t save you anything). You only need one wand–that way the kids can run through the game together.
To run through the whole game took about 3-4 hours. The initial part of the game is easy for a non-gamer like me to understand because the main game consoles tell you to go collect items and tell you their location. At the end of each level the game lost me. You would interact with a console, but there is nothing to tell you what to do. For example on the final level you have to figure out:
a) How to wake up the dragon. If you go back to the portrait of the dragon you will see three or four symbols in the painting. Back at the console if you touch those (and only those) symbols in order, you wake up the dragon.
b) How to fight and defend yourself against the dragon. You have picked up several attacks and defenses, and have to figure out what will actually do anything.
If I was a kid this would make me insane. HOW DO I EVEN PLAY THIS STUPID GAME?! I would shout and then I would cry. BUT in retrospect I can appreciate this element of the game because it makes it very social. You will inevitably run into a boy who looks like he knows what he is doing, and he will be all too happy to share with your children how to beat that level. Think of it as an ice breaker.
Magiquest is most active in the evening. We played it on first arriving at the hotel while we waited for Nic to get off work, and we only ran into one other player during that early afternoon stretch. Will played it again in the evening Thursday with his buddies, and many more people were playing at the time. Will and Ellie were back at it again first thing Friday morning, and there were only a handful of kids playing. If you’d like help from the experts, hit the halls after 8pm.
Which brings me to which halls you want a room on. Magiquest is only on levels 3, 4, and 5, so if your kids will be playing Magiquest, request a room on those levels! If you aren’t into the Magiquest thing, request to be far, far away! Many of the clues are directly outside guest rooms, and since they are loud (and since kids are louder), you could easily find yourself with a lot of noise outside your door at 9pm. If you have a younger crew with you, this may not be desireable. We lucked out–I hadn’t requested a particular floor, but we were on the third floor in a room that wasn’t directly adjacent to either the stairs (which are heavily used by Magiquesters) or a game element, and so I didn’t hear any quest related noise.
Magiquest makes for a LOT of walking, particularly up and down the stairs. Bring your running shoes and make the kids run between clues and you’ll have your cardio for the day.
The big question with Magiquest is how much autonomy you’ll give your kids in running around by themselves. Our fifth grader was allowed to go out Thursday night with his two friends from school that happened to also be staying at the hotel (we required that he check back into our room every 15 minutes). Friday morning we felt comfortable enough to let our fifth grader and first grader go out together, requiring that they check in every 10 minutes (they made a habit of checking in every time they were on our floor, which meant they ran into the room about every 5 minutes). This was bliss. Nic read a book and I took a nap. We very much enjoyed our relaxing morning while the kids raced from game clue to game clue.
I think Magiquest is most fun and most intuitive for the 3rd grade and up crowd. It would have been too difficult for our first grader on her own, but was very much on target for the fifth grader. Middle schoolers and up would likely find it Not Cool Enough.
The other entertainment:
The forest friends story hour at 8pm was adorable and I was glad that I made it a high priority to take our first grader down for it. The animatronic bear in the lobby comes to life and several friends pop up to sing and tell a story. (I couldn’t tell you anything about the plot, since I had brought my own book, but Ellie enjoyed it.) After the presentation a staff member came out to read a book with the Great Wolf Lodge mascot, but after getting all the kids up for a dance, he neglected to have them sit back down, so Ellie quickly asked to go back to our room since she couldn’t see over the other kids. So for us the actual story time was a bust, but the forest friends presentation was a hit.
The hotel offers a manicure/pedicure salon that is ice cream themed and would have been a source of major angst for our first grader if we hadn’t talked about it ahead of time. (Talking with your kids ahead of time about the money they may and may not want to spend during your trip is the best piece of advice I can give!) Luckily I heard about it in advance, so I was able to go over the prices with my daughter and explain that I would be happy to take her to a regular nail salon after our trip if she really wanted to get a pedicure and it would cost her a lot less. We also discussed how beat up your toenail polish gets when you go swimming! In the end, we decided to bring nail polish to paint our toes together while in the hotel room. (We were too busy doing other things, though, and ended up saving painting our nails for when we got home, which was a great way to save something fun for home!)
There is also a candy store, so you can preempt that by bringing some special treats in your suitcase.
I read that the ropes course was a good value at $13, and the kids had wanted to spend their money on it, but we ended up being fully entertained with the waterpark and Magiquest. Something to remind your kids is that they can always come back and do the ropes course or arcade (or put-put golf or Magiquest), but the waterpark is a one time only deal.
The food:
The best part of the Colorado Springs location is that there is a lot of great food nearby. We had my favorite ever pizza delivered on Thursday night (Boriello Brothers) which actually cost more than the hotel’s pizza, but it is the world’s best pizza and they don’t deliver to our house, so it was awesome. We had lunch at Freddy’s Thursday and had contemplated dinner at Colorado Mountain Brewery and the BBQ place for Friday’s dinner but decided we were all wiped and grabbed Chinese on our way home instead. Our only experiences with the food in the hotel were donuts from Dunkin Donuts on Friday morning and our typical-for-a-waterpark lunch on Friday afternoon.
We could have saved money by bringing meals, but THIS IS MY VACATION, PEOPLE. I WILL BRING ALCOHOL AND STRING CHEESE AND THAT IS ALL.
The staff:
The staff was wonderfully friendly and I was constantly impressed by how vigilant the lifeguards seemed to be. We were celebrating the kids’ birthdays, so on check-in the staff sang them a little song and they got special birthday versions of the wolf-ear headbands that you get when you check in.
The bill:
Nic and I are divided when it comes to the value-for-money of the experience. Our room was 30% off and was $167 before the $50 ‘taxes and resort fee’ fee. That brought our total for the room and two days of waterpark play to $220, with another $40 for Magiquest and about $100 for food. I felt that it was a good value for the experience, but Nic said that he wasn’t sure he would recommend it to many people, especially given the normal cost of a weekend or school-on-break room. So a one thumb up, one thumb neutral from our family. (And like 18 thumbs violently up from the children.) Then again, Nic’s the one who had to ride the Wolf Tail twice, so maybe I would also be shying away from recommendations if I’d paid that kind of money to basically fall out of a building.
Ignoring Nic and Going Anyway? Don’t forget to pack:
Pajamas, robes, and slippers for the kids–the older ones will get a kick out of running around playing Magiquest in their pajamas and the littles will want to go to Story Hour in the pjs.
Snacks and drinks for the mini fridge and k-cups for your coffee maker. I brought plastic wine glasses and sparkling apple cider for the kids. Don’t forget microwave popcorn too!
Nail polish and fun candy to rival the money pits in the lobby.
Costumes if you have them for Magiquest (we sadly couldn’t find Ellie’s robe in the hustle to get ready, but they would have loved to both have their jedi robes for playing Magiquest).
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Cathi Murray - Oh my! This is the cutest thing I have ever heard of! What an awesome idea for a little girls party.