An Act of Kindness

One small word made 5 children and 2 adults very happy last night. As I stated in a previous post my 11 year old granddaughter and her best friend are here for the weekend. They are such sweet girls. We've gone shopping, enjoyed lunch dates, did some crafting, and visited the Maritime museum where we toured the submarine.

Some of the hands on activities for visitors to the Wi Maritime Museum.

ALL of the kids love the water room.

The US Cobia. Yes, we toured the whole sub and it was cold inside and out. The heat was not working that day so it was cold on the tour .....and when we arrived above board after the tour we had a suprise- more SNOW.....hmmm

Walking through the tiny doorways. Tailyn is petite.......and I am not, so I had lots of 'fun' getting through the doors.

It's the middle of winter in WI and we are having our coldest temps so far, the past couple of days have been barely above zero for the high. We are not winter people anyway-no snowmobiles or skis here. I wanted to do something fun with the girls so I promised them we'd go swimming. (My SIL and her son go swimming at a local hotel for a small fee). The girls wanted to invite my 2 grandsons and nephew to go along and everyone was able to, the kids were excited! Per SILs request I called the hotel to be sure that it would be OK to bring them on a Friday night (weekends are usually kept for the hotel guests).....and the person who answered the phone said 'No'...oh dear, what can I do now? I called a couple more places and they said the same thing..........so I called the one place I knew we could go-the YMCA. The cost was $15 a family (not bad for me with 4 kids, but not so good for SIL with only 1 child). The hot tub is in anther area so we couldn't relax in there and leave the kids swim alone (ages 6-11) and I think the pool is deeper (the younger ones might be too short to just play). SIL was not too thrilled about going to the Y so I made a few more calls to hotels and explained that I had grand kids here from out of town and promised to take them swimming. Finally one gal took pity on me and said 'YES'. I felt as if I had struck gold, we were thrilled.....when I asked her the cost she told me to just come and swim. The whole time we were there we had the pool to ourselves. The kids alternated from the pool to the hot tub and had tons of fun. After about 1-1/2 hours they were getting hungry and we did not see a vending machine so we said it was time to leave. The kids have 'eagle eyes' and they had spotted a coffee pot with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate on the way in so I said it would be OK to have hot chocolate. I felt guilty swimming for free and then using up their hot chocolate so I offered to pay, she said 'we have lots more' and even brought out some small bags of Teddy Grahams for the kids. We all thanked her for her generosity....her parents raised a kind and compassionate young woman! and I won't be promising to take anyone swimming on a Friday night again with out making sure we have a place to go.

I enjoyed myself just knowing that the kids had so much fun!

Love that smile!