So it’s four days until payday, I promised the kids muffins, and I’m out of everything I need. Items subbed: brown rice flour for regular white wheat (made them crumblier), yogurt for milk (made them tangier), baking soda+cream of tartar+corn starch for baking powder (I didn’t notice any difference), butter for oil (yum), and mini loaf pan for muffin pan (fun!). They practically aren’t muffins at all! But they’re yummy anyways. 🙂 BTW, I went here for help with the substitutions. Love that site!
When we were planning Spring Break originally, Nick wasn’t taking time off. I’d thought about going to see my parents or staying here…and then at the weekend we had a Teen Regional Weekend for church. Plans changed.
Nick looked at the schedule and realized this was a great time to a) do our family vacation (a mini one this year due to other travel going on later in the year) and b) to go see the Magna Carta (on display in Houston). So we added that to the schedule.
Meanwhile I realized that my much postponed visit to see my bff needed to happen during that week, too.
So our break became one long car ride with interruptions here and there.
We started off our break with a Holcomb Family Dinner at Nick’s parents house.
Saturday, this happened:
Then on Sunday we started the first leg of our journey… to College Station, where I spent a lot of time sitting around while the kids went exciting places, like the ice skating rink.
I did break free and run off with Steph for a while to do some catching up and shopping. My favorite thing we saw:
While I was gone:
Then on Tuesday we drove down to Houston to tour the Houston Museum of Natural Science and to see the 1217 copy of the Magna Carta.
On Wednesday, we drove back to Tyler, dropped Nick off, then the kids and I drove to Quitman to visit the cousins at the park near their new house.
On Thursday, we did a bunch of laundry, repacked, and headed up to Colleyville to see Kay. Unfortunately, she was unexpectedly still in Houston. We spent several hours trying to amuse ourselves on our own before she made it back.
Then the girls had to go to gymnastics class (and yes, at this point we were wondering why we were even invited up, and by the end of the visit there was unpleasantness), so we took the kids to the park.
The next morning we had a muffin cook-off.
Our plan for the rest of the day involved the ginormous amount of books to go through and then take to sell at Half Price Books.
After Half Price, we went to Cost-co to celebrate Pi day the cheap way.
Then we went back to the house for movies and a frantic search for my debit card.
In the evening before bed we had one final bit of happy Pi-ness:
Saturday we got up and drove over to McKinney for the Dallas UCG Regional Teen Weekend.
We had church and a Bible study earlier in the day, then in the evening there were separate dinners for the pre-teens/families and for the teens. After dinner, the teens had a dance and the pre-teens/families were left on their own for entertainment.
The next morning we got up and had breakfast back at the Heard Museum before going for a little hike on the nature trails.
After the trail (which the kids didn’t go on because it was FREEZING!), we headed out to Garland to the Skatium.
After the skating, we had one last meal together before we left for home.
And that was the end of our Spring Break. 🙂
Nick and I took the Pack 369 Tiger Cubs up for a tour of Camp Ford, the largest Prisoner of War camp during the Civil War this side of the Mississippi.
At Nick’s church there is definitely a “more is better” philosophy going on when it comes to events. If a chili supper for the whole church is fun, adding a sing-a-long is better. If a potluck isn’t quite enough, a game night makes it even better. So therefore if there’s an International Dinner, a Variety Show must follow. (Not that this is all bad…I’m just a one-thing-at-a-time kind of gal.)
Friday morning was the Royal Wedding, so we all got up extra early. Well, that’s why I got up extra early. 
I don’t know why everyone else did. But I commandeered the TV and switched it over to wedding programming, which I’d been recording for hours earlier. We fast-forwarded through the commercials and less interesting bits. I made muffins (I’d wanted to make scones, but was outvoted by the children who’d be NOT eating them) and several kinds of tea. 
We put up decorations and wore fancy/silly hats. 
The kids were mesmerized by the hats and fancy dresses.
We managed to just finish watching the ceremony in time to leave for school. We dropped off the big kids, then hit the grocery store for Field Trip supplies (water bottles & lunchables). We met up behind the buses by the school to caravan over to Camp Tyler. G and I got out and were once again given bad information from the office. Fortunately we talked to the bus driver (who we recognized from last years field trips) and found out that we would have been following the wrong bus (which some other people did later), as he was taking the kindergarteners to the zoo. Eventually we followed the right bus and even though that driver went the wrong direction we managed to get there thanks to my map. The kids had a blast at Camp Tyler. 
My kids like going because they feel super-extra-smart there, as we follow things at home like the Nutrition Pyramid and Recycling and Composting and Gardening. 
Nick’s parents and sister’s family have farm animals, too, so the kids do know a lot about everything that happens at “The Farm”. The other kids? Not so much. They’re mostly low-income kids whose parents grew up in the city/town and haven’t ever been out in the country. 
It’s fun for me seeing them get to explore this other world and it’s beyond comprehension to them that one of their classmates actually lives this way every day. After lunch I gathered up our classes recyclables, which astonished the teacher because she didn’t know our city had a recycling program. 
G and I spent a little while after we got home just resting, as the day was warm and we were tired. Nick got the big kids and took B out hiking for scouts. I took my two out to Taco Bell for dinner, then gathered up the party supplies, and met Nick and B (who’d dined at Wendy’s) at Fire Mountain Amusements for D’s birthday party.
We’d not invited a whole lot of kids to D’s party because at $20 a kid, it was way too expensive to invite the whole class. Four of the 10 invited showed up (the kids from church all had too far to travel to come – I tried to tell D that before he invited them, but he was insistent on it), 2 brought siblings, plus our three kids brought the number up to 9. We used the 10th wristband to get everyone extra tokens for the arcade at the end before parents showed up. So it was actually good that not everyone showed up. 🙂 We spent the first part of the party in the arcade. The kids loved running around in that dark room, playing whatever they wanted. After that we split up a bit, with the younger kids going to the smaller kart track and the big kids going to the bigger one. I ran around trying to get photos of everyone.
Nick took G on the big track, as G was too small for the smaller track. After that I took G on the bumper boats with the rest of the kids. That was soo much fun! I was drenched by the time I got out.
When that was done, each kid picked their favorite thing and went on it. Some kids did karts, some did more bumper boats, some did more arcade or checked out the other rides there.
Finally it was time for cake and presents. We weren’t given any time in the party room to decorate beforehand, as the party before us went over, but I think the kids weren’t really paying attention to that anyway.
All in all, it was a great party! 🙂
Saturday was a regular Saturday for the most part. Got up, ate breakfast, got ready for church, went to church. I was feeling weird all day, lots of dizziness, tingling, and crazy brain fog, so I spent quite a bit of church out in the foyer trying not to fall over. The kids prepared for the Pentecost Presentation coming up. Nick did his media stuff. Eventually the kids and I went home, ordered a pizza, and watched a crazy French Canadian puppet movie about a dragon that ate all the stars while Nick went to prom with his mom. Yes, I did say “prom” and “with his mom.” His brother was the DJ and Nick went to dance with his mom since his dad doesn’t dance AT ALL and she was one of the sponsors for the prom. Anyway, he came home not too late, telling me that he got to dance with our little nieces at the house, who were hanging out with their Pa, and that most of the kids at prom didn’t dance at all. Also that his brother played the Doctor Who theme song for him. 🙂
Sunday was…well, what’s becoming a regular thing, where Nick gets up early, grocery shops, and then goes to work. I got up a bit later, fed the kids toaster pastries, and started on the cleaning. We cleaned until Nick got back around lunch time and then I headed out with my Girls Night Out ladies for an afternoon performance of The Diviner at our local junior college. It was so good. 
🙂 Came home later to my husband making a special dinner (steak, baked potatoes, caramelized onions, zucchini, all so yummy). Sent the kids to bed and watched the latest Doctor Who. Oh, that show! So mind-twisty! Love it, though. 🙂
And now it’s Monday. It’s cold & rainy & we are keeping the house warm by doing laundry. So much laundry.
We’ve had quite a day here. My eldest son hit a golf ball with a baseball bat and it went straight through the kids bedroom window. The glass company said they’d be here in less than 2 hours, but it took many phone calls and 7 hours for them to get here. Delightful, really. I made a list of good things about all this in my head all day long, to counteract the screaming, hysterical woman in my head. Such fun.
So anyways, since it was President’s Day and I’m a theme-loving kind of gal, we had a whole day of fun planned.
First we played Animal Crossing. We like taking care of our little town and I think it’s good that this game teaches them to take care of the environment with the recycling center and to pull all the weeds and take care of planting all around and not just in their own little places. It’s fun!
Then, for second breakfast, we had what I like to call “The Color of Money Muffins” which were green muffins with multicolored sprinkles inside to mimic the dollars that Presidents adorn. They were chocolate orange flavored. Yumm.
The kids played outside, which is when the glass thing happened.
After cleaning up all the glass and moving around furniture and cleaning up all the toys we found under said furniture, we made George Washington-style hats to wear around the rest of the day and also made cherry trees out of craft paper and yet more of the little red pom-poms leftover from Christmas.
Another thing we did was a game called “Ask the Kids.” The first question: If you could be president for a day what would you do?
D: make some laws, like going green and saving animal habitats.
B: wanted to save the animals, too, by checking if they were okay. for people, he wanted to have floating chairs for all the elderly people, the kind that don’t have to be pushed by anyone and that float high enough that it would be easy for them to get in and out of cars easily.
G: didn’t want to be president. he wanted to be a robber and steal peoples clothes (?!?!?!) or, even BETTER, to be a Jedi and battle the droids.
The second question: What do you think the President of the USA does all day?
D: He stays in his office and works on paper and passes the laws.
B: WORK! He works all day!
G: I don’t know. Maybe he writes to his friends every day.
The third question: Why do we have a president?
D: So we can stay free from other countries. In the beginning people wanted George Washington to be King, but he said “No, I want to be President.”
B: He’s here so we don’t get robbed or anything. He makes laws to help us.
G: (ran off & had to be dragged back) Because someone needs to do some work.
The kids left for a while after all this to hang out with my parents while the glass man came…or didn’t come, as happened for several hours. I crawled around their room with a light, checking for glass in unexpected places (it was still everywhere, despite vacuuming, because we have Berber carpet in that room), and did laundry, and entertained B when he came back because the Lord of the Rings cartoon was too scary.
We were also going to make cherry tarts today, but since we didn’t make it to the grocery, that has to wait until tomorrow, I guess. For storytime tonight we read some of our President books: “Arthur Meets the President” by Marc Brown, “Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln” by Judith St. George & illustrated by Matt Faulkner, and “Sesame Street: I Want to be President” by Michaela Muntean and illustrated by Tom Brannon. We really recommend the Sesame Street one, as it explained the best what a president actually does. The Abe Lincoln one is really good, too, but we’re not done with it yet, as it’s a very long one. The Arthur one is mainly Arthur-ish, but still good.
Anyway, hope everyone else had a great President’s Day! 🙂
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Now playing: Kim Richey – Without You
via FoxyTunes
Lisa Holcomb 