Dance, Retirement, Vegas

We've had an eventful June. It started with Sophie's (and my) dance recital. It was Sophie's first and she truly did amazing. I only had eyes for her, but when I look back on the videos and see her compared to other kids, she really did shine.

Then, I had a huge dream come trye when my mom (kinda suddenly in my eyes, especially considering how long I had been begging for it to happen) retired! We celebrated at the very fitting Anchos and then popped questionable champagne afterwards in the parking lot.

After Sophie had her last day of preschool (wow!) our family took off to Vegas for the weekend. AJ and I were really looking forward to it for awhile, for lots of reasons, but man it felt great to get that Vegas energy again after so long away! I hadn't been since 2020 (the weekend before the world shut down!) and AJ since maybe 2022.

We stayed at MGM, which I was excited about because I wanna stay in every one of these hotels and hadn't stayed there yet, and it was also specifically chosen because of their lazy river and grand pool complex, and we were there with the kids.

It was both super fun and super... something, being there with kids ha. It was fun to explore things there with them for the first time, but also super painful to be there with kids! It's hard to watch others drink and gamble and sleep in while we were... not those things haha. But it was such a fun time!

First of all, lazy rivers are absolutely where it's at. We all had such a good time, and it really worked well with Sophie's and Summer's respective floaties and being able to just float along with us with no effort. We overlapped with Gangy and Grandpa Jim for a day and that was fun to be int he lazy river with them, and then regrouping in the afternoon at the M&M World and then Buca di Beppo at Excalibur followed by the Fun Dungeon haha.

View from our room

Gold lion!

Our green hotel with the gold lion!

I was wondering what we would do with kids in Vegas but there really is a lot! I mean I was fine with the lazy river and naps but you know, these kids need more. We walked the Strip, played games, took the monorail, spent way too much money in the Flamingo hotel gift shop, and went to Excalibur's Fungeon (not a typo) more than once.

It was too windy for the fountain shows womp womp

We really had so much fun we were debating staying another night but then we remembered why we were checking out on Saturday as it was - we were absolutely not going to do that Sunday drive back with the girls and quadruple the drive time. So we still left Saturday. It was for the best, we got to do laundry and clean and getting ready for the week. Sophie was starting summer camp at her school but we had a hard time explaining what summer camp was to her.

On Monday after she got back, I asked her how camp was and the response I got was "we didn't camp. It was a normal day."

Oh well, I tried.