March 2019

The best part of March was Spring Break, which I'll report on in another post.  But we managed to have some other fun too.  Jen and Sherri and I were able to go snowboarding again this year.  The trees were caked with snow and looked pretty weird but cool.  It was a fun day!

Kylee and Sadie competed at Festival.  Is competed the right word?  They played and received a score.  They worked really hard, but maybe not quite as much as they could have.  They get so tired of practicing, and Festival takes a lot of practice so they get tired of playing the same songs.  It was cute to see how nervous Sadie was before it started.  She looked a little sick.  But they both did great.  Kylee said before she went in, "I DON'T want to do Festival again."  I told her it was good for her to have a challenge.  She says she doesn't mind playing at recitals, but hates Festival.  The reason is because she wants a perfect score if she's going to receive a score.  And she plays hard songs (which she generally chooses herself) so it's hard to get it perfect.  I love that she chooses harder songs.  I love that she doesn't back down from a challenge, in most things.   In the end, Sadie scored 98% and Kylee scored 96%.  Kylee was jokingly devastated.  She really was disappointed, almost embarrassed.  I had to explain that first of all, 96 is a great score.  Secondly, it's not going to be posted on the walls of her school so everyone knows that she didn't get 100.  I think she might be comparing herself to her piano friend Lizzie who started doing Festival a few years ago so she was at an easier level.  Anyway, it was all a bit of a learning experience for the girls.  Maybe next time they won't procrastinate learning their songs for so long and they will have more time to perfect them.

 Festival is on a Friday and then they perform one of their songs at a regular recital the next day.  Kylee did, however Ryan took Sadie to a USU basketball game, one of the biggest games of the season.  It was on ESPN and they won so it was a great time for them.  Unfortunately I forgot to give him specific instructions to get a picture of them together, so this is the only picture we have for the memory books.  Daddy-Sadie bball date 2019.  Sadie LOVED it.

Dylan's fifth grade class has a class store every trimester where you spend your class bucks.  You have to qualify to participate by meeting math and reading goals and having no missing work.  Dylan says only maybe a third of the class gets to do it.  (For the record, I force Dylan to keep up with his math goal.  If it were up to him, he would fail math completely and not even care.)  For the store, the kids are supposed to bring things to sell to others.  Most kids bring candy or soda or some other toys.  Some kids make treats, one brought homemade slime.  But I was really proud of Dylan because he spent a lot of time making these awesome perler bead characters to sell.  It's obviously easier to ask your mom to buy junk food to sell.  But he is talented at this and he says people love them and he sells them really fast.  He spends his free time listening to audiobooks while creating these.  He's a bit of a perfectionist about them too.  I tried to help him with his Valentine's Day swords, and he was showing me how I was messing up on the pattern, even though it was barely different and some of the pictures online were the same as how I was doing it.  It wasn't good enough for him.

At the end of the month, though there was still some snow on the ground at home, we headed to Boise for the girls first soccer tournament in the U13/14 league with their new Premier team.  Kylee and I went alone and stayed in this sweet hotel.

 Even though we were caught in a full-on blizzard on the drive near Pocatello, Boise had some pretty great weather.  They played at 8:30 am and we thought we were going to freeze to death but it was much milder than at home and the sun was out so it was nice.

 They had hours before their next game, and I had a 20 mile run on the calendar for my marathon training.  I looked for a good place to run in Boise, found the river path, and Jen decided to join me (even though the furthest she had run was maybe 16.  It was a beautiful run!  We even saw surfers, lol.

The girls did not win their games at this tournament.  We were missing a couple great players, and we just had not played as a team yet, especially outside.  They played indoor but not all together, and indoor is different.  It was a learning experience for sure.  The drive to Boise is LOOOONG and boring and even worse late at night.  We didn't want to spend two nights in the hotel and miss church so we left after her last game around 7:30 and didn't get home until midnight or later.  Not my favorite.