Sheboygan

I have no pictures from our last day in Sheboygan, but here is what we did: ate pancakes, played Apples to Apples Jr., colored, ate lunch, Grandma took the girls to a water park while my dad and I walked to a funky coffeehouse downtown and drank chai before he walked me to my massage. Yes, I am not making any of this up.  And there was lasagne and wine for dinner.  These extra days of our visit have been well worth it in terms of quality time and renewal...thank you!!!

Here are some photos from the past few days - the glimpses of the sun, and our perseverance in the rain.  On Monday we headed to the Sheboygan Marsh, which was vast but inaccessible without a boat. You can see it stretching beyond Grandma Liz and the girls, high in the viewing tower. We tried a short hike, but there were little flies and mud and a grouchy girl.

Next we stopped at a section of the Ice Age Trail, studded with birch trees and showing off one spring wildflower, the hepatica. I would love to spend more time walking this trail.

After lunch in Sheboygan Falls, we headed to a new park we had visited last summer: Bookworm Gardens.  As before, the girls loved it...

One addition was little book nooks that held books you could sit and read, which we did.

Some of us acted out the stories (Katie and the Sunflowers) while listening along...(I would also like to mention that while my daughter makes the weather here look downright HOT, I can assure you that it was nothing like hot. It has almost felt like spring here, and there are still medium piles of snow at the edges of some of the larger parking lots.)

Tuesday we went to the Children's Museum, which was nearly empty, as the local kids have returned to school this week.

Our hands-down favorite activity was the press-pin wall...

Ani, who leans toward the intrepid, quickly scampered up and through this netted tunnel, and thought it a lot of fun.  Eliza is cautious and needs to observe more often than not, before deciding whether or not she can or will do something.

Ani must have made it look like fun, because before too long, and after a couple of tries, Eliza got to having fun with it too.  In these moments their dynamic reminds me so much of my sister and I when we were kids.  She always tried the scary stuff first - the ski run, the slide, everything. She even has tattoos; I'm still working up to that one...

The lake is such a magnet for us; it is the closest to a sea that we've been for too long.  We find it mesmerizing, so our day ended there...

Our trip at an end, the weather taking a turn for the better, it is time we made our way home...