Category: Danielle

I’m so overdue for blogging. Here’s the recent wedding story.

We went to Chicago for my niece’s wedding. My daughters were both flower girls. And it was their first wedding. So lots of excitement.

It was a nice weekend in Chicago (for November). The wedding was downtown. So that afternoon we walked around and ended up by Lake Michigan on the beach. We were pretty much the only ones there, but the girls still loved it.

Then it was back to the hotel to get ready.

The room where we waited before the wedding had a pool table that for some reason was not in use. My girls changed that.

The wedding was a nice one and a short one, which was good for the girls. But Danielle was fascinated by the whole thing. Following the ceremony there was a cocktail hour while they switched over the room for the reception. My girls managed to discover this couch which was very slippery. With a running start they could slide on their stomachs the whole way across.

Finally there was dancing. The DJ hit a long stretch playing music they both knew so they danced a lot.

After a lot of dancing, the DJ played a slow song. This annoyed the girls and Elly and I danced together. By this point Tori was so tired that she literally toppled over on the floor.

A really fun night.

This may be the longest it’s taken me to post a blog about our vacation. We’re busy at Origami and I came back refreshed and recharged.

The vacation was fantastic. Though for the most part, you can read last year’s post or the one before. Same great beach, great weather, hermit crabs, minnows, boogie boards, bike riding, mini-golf, low tide where you walk a mile straight out and one great sunset after another.

One amusing story happened the very first day. This beach house has three bedrooms on the first floor. Then there’s a spiral staircase to the upstairs where there are two more. You go up the stairs and one bedroom is to the left, then there’s a bathroom and to get to the back bedroom you have to go through the bathroom (one of those two door bathrooms). The whole upstairs has the slanted ceiling thing going on which  makes it seem kind of like a clubhouse, so Danielle decided she wanted to sleep up there. Of course that means Tori does as well.

So Danielle gets all her stuff up in the back bedroom. She wants to set up everything just right. When she’s done she calls me up to check it out. Meanwhile Tori is just exploring upstairs. As Danielle is showing me how she set up her room, Tori comes into the back bedroom and shuts the door (the one from the bathroom, the only door).

I tell her not to close that door and go to open it. Locked.

Normally that would be a pretty bad thing, but my wife is downstairs and I have my phone with me. So I call her and ask her to let us out. She comes upstairs. Then I hear her calling to me from farther away than I would expect. She calls me back and says, "how am I supposed to open the door?"

"um, twist the knob?"

"but it’s locked"

At this point we realize that Tori locked both bathroom doors prior to locking us in the back bedroom. OK, that’s not good. My wife is locked out on her side and we’re locked in on our side.

I get truly mad at Tori, but then Danielle starts to panic so I go into reassurance mode. These are those simple push button bathroom locks, so you can usually pop them with a coat hanger or something. Except we’re locked in a bedroom of a rental place. It’s totally bare. So Danielle is getting more worried. But I point out to Danielle that worst case I could climb out the window so she calms down. Tori is just sitting on the bed, totally quiet. While this is very out of character for her, I don’t really notice because being quiet and out of the way is fairly helpful at this point.

So I’m on the phone with my wife, explaining to her what sorts of things will work to pop the lock from her side. It takes a while, but she ends up with a bobby pin from downstairs and I ultimately manage to talk her through popping the lock.

So Danielle is fine and now I truly notice that Tori is just sitting there silent. The combination of knowing she did something wrong and being scared really got to her.

Danielle decided she’d rather use the downstairs bedroom. And Tori pretty much didn’t go upstairs the rest of the vacation.

And we made sure that bobby pin stayed in the back bedroom for the rest of the vacation…

I’ll have a full post in a day or two, but this is clearly the coolest picture from the trip.

Victoria is 3 1/2 and Danielle is now 7 1/2.

Danielle loves to do lemonade stands. It’s amazing how many people just give them money…