Spring Break and St Patrick’s

We didn’t do anything exciting for either St Patrick’s Day or Spring Break.  My kids were convinced the leprechauns were coming, but I wanted to keep it low-key.  The leprechauns did come and leave a few shamrocks along with some shamrock stickers and some chocolate coins. 

And I made ‘green’ pancakes (using spinach).  They looked greener before they were cooked.  They probably would’ve looked more green if I had used white flour instead of wheat.  Oh well, it’s the thought that counts because the kids thought it was pretty cool.  I mean, they did have chocolate chips, so...

Dylan was sure there was going to be a big party in his school class for St. Patrick’s Day.  I tried to tell him not to get his hopes up.  Sure enough, they barely even talked about it.  I think the whole day was a bit of a let-down for Dylan.  But at least he had gold coins!

Spring Break was the last full week in March.  The people in my neighborhood take Spring Break very seriously.  Most people at least went to St George or Vegas.  Some went on cruises or to Hawaii.  We kind of wanted to go somewhere, but we couldn’t.  Not really.  Because Kylee had her State Gymnastics Competition the Saturday at the end of Spring Break and they are not allowed to compete if they don’t go to all three days of practice.  Why not just skip it?  Well, because it’s STATE, the biggest competition that she can do at level 3.  But also because we were told that we were required to go to three competitions plus State during our first year competing.  So I suppose they could kick her off the team if we chose not to go.  Not that they would have.  But we had agreed to their terms and it only seemed right.  It’s not like we had anywhere we were dying to go anyway.  I thought about going to Lava Hot Springs, but Kaden wouldn’t have been able to swim in the hot pools and it was chilly outside to just hang out without being in the pools.  We were going to go to their indoor pool but decided it was a waste to go there when the outside slides weren’t even open.  In the end, I ran out of energy and we all decided not to bother.  So we found things to do here.

The weekend that started Spring Break was really nice weather.  We had regional conference on Sunday so we had a lot of the day left to just hang out.  So we went to the park as a family.

The kids are capable of playing nicely together occasionally.

Sadie is surprisingly good at the monkey bars, and really not very fearful.  If they are low enough she will go without any help and just drop when she gets stuck.  The first time I saw her attempting some was at the park in Logan and I was too far away to run and save her.  I imagined her screaming after she fell, but she didn’t.  She brushed herself off and a few minutes later was back on them doing it again.  Funny girl.

Dylan took a little while to get the monkey bars down, partly because he was scared I think.  And partly because he’s heavier and more solid so it’s harder to hold himself up.  Or he’s just not very coordinated.  Whatever, he’s got it down now.

Always carrying this little guy around. Which is the main reason these are all phone pictures and not from my big camera. 

The next couple of days were not great weather so we went to ijump for Family Night on Monday.  We normally wouldn’t have chosen that night but we had a free family pass from when we had Dylan’s birthday there and they messed up the pizza order a little.  The kids had fun, though not really together.  Dylan loves dodgeball and Kylee doesn’t.  Kylee spent her time working on roundoff back-tucks or back-handspring back-tucks, etc, etc.

We also hit up the library, always a good time with my kids.

We had a couple free passes for Leo’s Place play area from the kids’ triathlon so we went there for lunch and Ryan and his dad met us there.  The kids had a BLAST!

We didn’t have much planned for Wednesday, and the kids were already butting heads, so as I was up in the night with the baby, my thoughts were on how to entertain the kids so they wouldn’t just fight or trash the house.  I came up with a scavenger hunt idea.  I thought they would really enjoy taking pictures so I came up with a list of things I wanted them to take pictures of.  They loved it, but it was really quite cold outside even though it was sunny, so they didn’t last all that long.  It was nice having them work together and play nice, though.

The weather got better at the end of the week.  So we packed up some food and a bike and scooter and we headed to the park.  Kylee chose to go play with Lexi instead of coming with us. She always wants to be playing with Lexi if she’s not at school or gymnastics and I’m not sure where the limit should be.  Anyway, we had fun just Dylan, Sadie, Kaden and me.

After running an errand or two, I took the kids to the snow shack.  I had seen someone post that it would be open for the first time and since the kids were playing so well and not just sitting in front of the TV, I decided to get one for them.  They loved it, of course!

Then I thought the kids could help me wash my car.  But even though they did try, they did no actually cleaning.  They had fun, though so that's good.

All in all, we had fun and it was a nice break for me to not have to get up at 7 to get the kids off to school since Kaden was NOT sleeping!  Little Stinker.