Why did I even bother?

Today, the girls spent the entire day playing fun and exciting games about going to the beach. The carpet was the sand and they lay blankets and towels on it and spent hours building pretend sand castles, shrieking with delight as the waves came in and out, and hunted for seashells. As far as I could tell, they had exactly as much fun pretending to go to the beach as they did going to the real beach minus the cost and effort of hotel, gas, 4 hour drive each way, packing, unpacking, applying sunscreen to 3 wiggly people, getting sand in your bum, etc. So I'm not sure why I bother taking them anywhere. Surely there's some value to having real experiences versus pretend ones, right? They're so hilarious. Right now, they're supposed to be asleep, but instead they're playing a game they just invented called "cheeseball." The way you play cheeseball is, you take all of your covers and roll them into a ball at the head of your bed. This is the cheeseball. Then, you take turns diving headfirst into it. This provides at least 45 consecutive minutes of fun and laughter until someone falls off the bed and gets hurt. In tonight's case, that person was Eve. But she seems to be feeling well enough now to play "seashell treasure jewel powers" with Laine.