A friend of mine from back home was having a birthday party and, since we didn’t have any plans, we decided “why not?” and hit the road. It also gave us a good excuse to grab some pumpkins from my dad’s house. Unfortunately my mom wasn’t home, but it kind of worked out for a relaxing weekend.

Despite the fact that it was really cold outside and we were little  under dressed, we had a great time. Evie in particular was going a mile a minute. She refused to come in from outside, forcing Sara or I to run around after her in the cold outside. She did not feel the cold at all, saying “I do NOT need to warm up!”

If you ask Evie what her favorite part was, she’ll say, “Cake!” Quite frankly, I can’t blame her. The frosting was some of the most delicious cake frosting I have ever eaten. It was fun to see old friends I haven’t seen in a while, but unfortunately, none of them brought their kids! So Evie was the only one.

There was still plenty to keep her occupied, most obviously, feeding the fish. They have a pond and the fish are trained to eat bread, in the scariest possible fashion. They had bread available, so we walked out onto the dock. “Hey, there’s a fish!” I said. Then I sort of looked at the wider picture in a horror movie style camera pan, and I realized that there were a lot of fish. All sitting in the water, silent and motionless, waiting in lines like soldiers. Very creepy. We started to throw little pieces of the bread and the water turned into a bubbling, seething, piranha-style mass. Soon the big fish came in from the deep, tossing the smaller fish out of the way and sometimes jumping out of the water to nab one out of the air. “You swim in this??” we asked incredulously. It looked like every water based horror movie I have ever seen. Evie loved it, couldn’t get enough, even though she mostly dropped her bread close to the dock where it was too shallow for the fish to get.

The fun didn’t stop with the fish either. Evie was obsessed with their golf cart, so they let Sara and me take her for a ride. We ended up by the highway teaching Evie to pump her arm and get semi’s to honk. We swung on a porch swing by a fire and ate smores looking out over the lake. We also ate some good food (other than the cake).

It wasn’t a perfect day, however. Shortly after we got to the party, we got a call from our security service saying our alarm was going off at home. Obviously this was a little scary because we were far, far from home. They sent the police and I never heard back from them. They told me they would call back if there was anything to report, so hypothetically the fact that they didn’t call meant there was nothing to see. In practice though, I would rather have heard, even if they didn’t find anything! Obviously nobody broke into our house, or else I would have run immediately to the computer and blogged it of course. But it was a little nerve wracking to come home a few days later, not knowing what we would find. Chances are Nala set it off (even though she never has before) and if that was the case, I’m sure it scared the crap out of her enough that she won’t do it again.