Spring Breakin' Pt. 1

EEK! March has swiftly come and gone, and the blog has been largely ignored for that time. A lot of things have conspired to keep me away, most of them having to do with the word "spring." Most significant of all is Spring Break, which my kids have been on for the last two weeks. School finally started today...whew! Keeping all three of the girls entertained has taken up a lot of my time. I've been doing a lot of fun "me" stuff over the last few weeks, too (some of which I'll talk about in detail in a later blog post). And around Easter, when I finally had a little time to sit down and compose my thoughts, I was hit by a massive allergy attack that left me feeling very fuzzy-headed and ready for bed. And here we are!

The week leading up to Spring Break was a very busy one for all of us, especially Nathan. He held several open houses in different parts of the community, which meant working many late hours. As a result, he only ended up with a two-hour workday on Friday the 15th! We decided to celebrate the Ides of March by taking a quick family trip to the Mesa Arizona Temple, something we've been hoping to do a little more often.

We didn't quite make it in time for the temple's annual Easter Pageant (one of these years, we have to take the family to that!), but we did get to see the stage all set up and ready to go:

Nathan and I took turns doing short sessions in the temple, while we also took turns taking the kids outside to play.

After we finished, we took a short trip over to Deseret Books, an LDS Church-owned bookstore chain that always leaves us feeling a bit weak-willed (we each bought a new book there...oops!). After that, we drove to Chandler to have another delicious family dinner at Rudy's, our new favorite barbecue restaurant. We've eaten there before, so I'll spare you the details. It was delicious...again! After that, we drove home in the evening twilight...it felt so great to spend some time at the temple. I hope we can make it there again later in the year.

Sunday, of course, was St. Patrick's Day. Whew...good thing all of us have Sunday-appropriate green clothing! Besides the green-wearing, though, this is not a really big holiday for our family. Besides cooking my usual corned beef-and-potato cakes dinner, I also got really ambitious and made orange rolls for breakfast for the first time:

 

Nathan and I thought they were incredibly delicious...the girls didn't like them much, though! Unbelievable. Oh, well...more for the parents! I am thinking of making them again and selling them at our community yard sale in a week.

Here's a quick rundown of what our family did during the first week of Spring Break:

Monday: After a few months of waffling, we finally decided to go "satellite-and-cable-free" for a while. We hardly watch any live TV at all any more, so we think this is a safe bet. To this end, we went to Best Buy and bought our first streaming device (a Roku 2 XD), and an HD television antenna. We will now be living at the mercy of Netflix and Amazon Prime for all our entertainment needs (with the occasional network-TV stopover to scratch my NFL itch, come fall). We had lunch out at Wing Stop, then went home and attached all our new toys. So far, they work great! That very day, I called Dish Network to cancel our nine-year service with them. It felt weird...but liberating at the same time! That night, Lorelai and I attended the baptism of Elnorra, a friend of Lorelai's from school. We were pretty pooped after that!

Tuesday: This ended up being our "slow day" of the week, since Aurora spent the middle of the night throwing up violently. So sad! Anyway, it meant a lot of sitting at home and watching TV (not that anyone complained about THAT!). We had intended to have a "movie party," and invite all our friends over, but we sadly had to postpone that for a week. After a long day of rest, everyone (especially Aurora) felt like themselves again, and it was back to Spring Break!

Wednesday: This was intended to be a "running errands in Tucson" day, but we got off to a late start, since our garage door broke in the night! Specifically, the spring used to pull the door up and down snapped in half (the resulting "snap" was so loud that Nathan and I heard it the previous night; we thought someone had thrown something at the garage door from the outside!). This made it basically impossible to pull the door open ourselves, and both our cars were parked inside! Unfortunately, we had to call a repair service just so Nathan could get the car out to go to work (he ended up being a couple of hours late). Our wallets felt uncomfortably lighter afterwards, but the serviceman showed up very promptly, worked quickly, and was very polite and helpful.

After our unexpected ordeal of getting out of our own house, we loaded up our car with all the old girls' clothes in our house...which is quite a lot, as you might imagine. Boxes and boxes worth! We also stuffed a bunch of old board games and puzzles into the trunk, for good measure! The reason for hauling all this stuff to Tucson? To trade it in for credit at some of our favorite second-hand stores: Twice As Nice, a secondhand clothing store that has had a lot of great finds for the girls and myself over the years; and Bookmans, an entertainment exchange (they carry books, DVDs, music, and games). We got very lucky at Bookmans; they bought almost everything we brought in (including some puzzles I thought were surely too "junky" to be bought, but who's complaining?). Twice As Nice was stingier, however; they scarcely bought back any of our old clothes (maybe five percent of the entire haul). However, since some of those clothes had been worn by all three girls, I couldn't fault them too much. In both cases, we got store credit to use for later. I am planning on selling off most of the remaining clothes at the upcoming community yard sale next week; hopefully that will be a bit more profitable. Anyway, after all these errands, the kids were clearly pooped, so home we went.

Thursday: This was definitely more of a goof-off day...

I decided the girls deserved some fun after our errand-heavy outing the day before. So, to Pump It Up we went!

Lorelai was determined to run up this wall and grab the flags. She did pretty well...

 

...most of the time. She never made it ALL THE WAY UP.

Yes, I realize this only shows half of Celeste's face...but it's the IMPORTANT half!

 

As always, the girls played themselves crazy!

This is one of the coolest pictures of Aurora ever...she looks like she's going so FAST! Kind of symbolizes her whole toddler-hood to this point.

After the playtime at Pump It Up was over, we drove back to Rancho Sahuarita, where a friend of mine had organized a cookie-decorating party in honor of the upcoming Easter holiday. The girls decorated some cookies, ate them immediately afterwards, and then went out for Round Two of climbing, jumping, sliding, and playing. Needless to say, their afternoon was spent crashing on the couch while I taught some piano lessons.

Friday: Another Lazy Day at home! The weather was incredibly beautiful, and so of course all the girls wanted to do was stay home and play. I made them turn off the TV (finally!), and they were able to spend much of the afternoon exercising their imaginations and play-acting with all their toys. I am so glad they play so well together. The monotony was broken up somewhat when some friends came over for a game night in the evening. It was short, but sweet.

With that, Week One of Spring Break came to an end...but there was a crazy, zombie-filled, baseball-season-ending Saturday just ahead. I will post more about both of those things soon.