A Day in My Life.......: Vacation at Silver Lake

Our 3rd day of vacation was Hannah's 9th Birthday! We spent the day at Michigan Adventure in Muskegon! We had a big breakfast at our campsite and headed about 1/2 hour south to the Park. It was so nice, it was not busy at all and the weather was beautiful, warm but not hot and humid! We hit the regular rides first. Kyle and Jesse took the older kids to do some of the roller coasters and Sally and I took Emily and Lilly to do the kiddie rides. Emily loved them but did not want them to end! We headed back out to the parking lot for our lunch. We decided that this year we would not be buying food inside the park! It is way to expensive and not that good. We filled up on sandwiches, chips, cookies and drinks and headed back in to the water park! The kids were so good about eating our lunch that we brought, no whining about wanting expensive "fair food" as I call it. I explained to them that in order for us to do more fun stuff we would make a sacrifice. They totally got it! A great teachable moment about being frugal, but still getting to do fun things. By the way I was able to save us $15 off our tickets with a coupon! I am coupon crazy. Emily was able to get in for free!

The water park was a blast. I spent a lot of time in the Kiddie pool/wading area with Emily and Kyle did the water slides with the older 3. Emily fell asleep on the lazy river with Kyle and I, so she got a good nap in her stroller!

We finished the day with more rides and a few games. We took some loose change we had from home and let the kids each play a couple games. We all sat down and played a game where you roll the balls into some holes to make a dog run across (kind of like Skee Ball) and since there was so many of us playing we were able to play for the biggest stuffed animal I have ever seen! I ended up winning and let Hannah have her pick since it was her birthday! She picked out this cute big dog, she was so excited and he hogged the back seat all the way home to our camper. Kyle was very happy to get me on their new roller coaster "the Thunder hawk". I think I surprised him when I said I would go on it with him. I loved it. It was probably one of the best roller coasters I have ever been on. I highly recommend riding it if you are visiting Michigan Adventure. Last time we were at Michigan Adventure I could not ride the rides since I was about 7 months pregnant with Emily!

We were going to try to have a cheap dinner on the way home to celebrate Hannah's Birthday, but it was late and nothing really was still open that would let us celebrate Hannah's birthday with free dessert and some Happy Birthday singing. She was bummed but was being really good about not showing it. I happened to see a little bakery in Silver Lake and I had Kyle run it and see if we could get Hannah something (like a cupcake) for us to stick a candle in and sing to her. It took him a few minutes but he came out with a birthday cake and it was even personalized with "Happy Birthday Hannah"! The bakery had a cake from that day that somebody never picked up so they sold it to us and even decorated it with her name! We surprised her with it. She was so happy. We sang to her and she made her wish and went to bed a happy 9 year old girl that night! Everyone slept great that night.

We really enjoy spending the day at Michigan Adventure. It is much closer to home than Cedar Point, cheaper and has a lot less people which in turn means less time waiting in line. I don't think we waited more than 5 minutes for any ride that day!