Winterpalooza

Winterpalooza is an event in Utah for kids held each year just at the time that kids are supposed to be going stir crazy in the winter weather. My kids sure have been.

One of the highlights for them was doing this ropes course. Micah was the smallest one we saw do it, and once he got to the top he looked down and decided it was really scary up there. So he just climbed up and then went back down. But afterwards he told me it was soo fun, so he still enjoyed it. We saw much older kids, even older than Julia, get up and start crying and go back down.

 Julia did great! I thought she might have trouble crossing the first couple step bridges but she breezed past those. She hesitated when she got to the single rope going across, but I yelled to her that it was just like the balance beam in gymnastics and she was able to do it pretty quickly as well. The next one was an X and after a couple seconds examining it she just decided to skip that one altogether. The last one was the toughest for her. She couldn't just skip it because she needed to get across in order to get down. She had a little trouble getting her lanyard to go in the right direction, then it was difficult for her to balance. I could see tears in her eyes as she tried to get it. But I was proud of her that she didn't give up and kept going and as she finally made it across.

Some of the other things they liked

Olympic Bobsled driver Jeremy Holm was super nice and let my kids climb all over his $20,000 bobsled. For some reason my kids were really fascinated by the bobsled. Maybe we'll have to take them to watch a practice sometime.

We got there right as the event opened and there weren't too many people there yet. We got to do face painting and get animal balloons without waiting in a line. This toy was supposed to be for older kids because it spins really fast, but since there wasn't a line the operator was nice and let Julia, Micah, and a couple other kids their age go and he just spun them around to the speed they felt comfortable. You can see Micah had a huge smile on his face, he loves rides that go fast. 

Micah said his favorite part was the truck full of sand with a bunch of trucks to play in the sand with. That is what he always does outside at our house when the weather is nice (except in dirt since we don't have a sandbox) so it makes sense that that's been what he has been missing. 

Besides that they spent a lot of time bouncing on bounce houses and going down bounce house slides. Early on there was no line, but later we had to wait ten minutes or so to get into each bounce house. Even Camden surprised me by climbing up to the top of the bounce house slides and going down. He has always been our most cautious child, and I could tell they scared him, but the promise of fun in spite of the scary was enough for him to go again and again.