A Nice Week

Last week was a much-needed little vacation for our family. It was the mid-winter break so the boys had the week off of kindergarten and preschool. And Michael’s work vacation just happened to fall on the same week, so he got Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off of work. It was nice to get a break from the routine of rushing from playgroup, to preschool, to the grocery store, to get home in time for the school bus, the speech therapist, and the piano teacher. Not that we just sat around the house all week – you know us better than that, don’t you?

On Monday we hung out around the house and then had some new friends, Melissa and her son Wyatt, over for family night. Wyatt is almost 8 years old, and I think he had a lot of fun playing with all the boys, especially after we finished our lesson, activity, and dessert and the boys headed down to the basement playroom.

And then on Tuesday we had our make-up day for our big anniversary celebration that we had originally planned in December but Michael got strep, so we got to try again. There are two days a year that they have a “scout ski night” through the church, when you can get an afternoon/night ski pass, rentals, and a lesson (if you choose) for less than it normally costs for a lift pass. So, we decided to try again, and this time it went much better, without any strep throat to interfere with our plans. Michael and I enjoyed skiing, even though we soon found that Bristol Mountain isn’t especially large and it’s “black diamond” runs are more like blue runs at other places we’ve skied before. But we had a lot of fun skiing through the trees, hitting a few moguls, and taking a run down the all-terrain park. It was nice to do that again – we haven’t been skiing together in years. And although I’m a much more cautious skier now that I have kids (and the idea of trying to take care of the kids with a broken leg or arm is not a very exciting one), we still had some really great runs, and got to enjoy going fast and my favorite part – skiing the trees. (We were sad to hear on the news the next day that a man skiing with his kids at Bristol that same night we were there died when he ran into a tree and hit his head. That’s one thing we will always do – require ski helmets in our family. I remember when my parents first made me wear a helmet when I was younger and I thought it was so un-cool, but I wear it all the time now and so does Michael, and it’s just not worth it not to wear one). Anyways, we had a great night skiing, and we found that we are both a little out of shape – we didn’t even last all the way until the park closed that night, but we did get in several very fun hours on the hill, so that was a very nice belated anniversary celebration.

On Wednesday Michael had his first day off of work, so we took the boys sledding at Center Park behind the Aquatic Center, and it was a lot of fun. It was especially nice now that some of the boys are old enough to be able to walk back up the hill and carry the sleds by themselves. They loved sledding, and by the end of the time we were there, all three of the oldest boys were going down at the very highest point of the hill (which was much steeper than the part of the hill where we started sledding), and Eli and Kolby were even trying to sled off a little jump that some older kids had built up in the snow at the top of the hill. All of the boys enjoyed sledding, and Michael and I got in a few runs with the kids too. Courtland fell asleep in my arms while we were there. And Isaac surprised us with his ability to walk up and down the steepest parts of the hill in the snow without slipping down. And none of the boys were crying from the cold when we were finished, even though we stayed over an hour and it was pretty windy and snowy. We enjoyed hot chocolate with lunch afterwards when we got home. Then Kolby had his piano lesson that afternoon. And I had Michael bring the sewing machine up from the basement for me (picture a 1950s machine complete with table and bench) and turned on a movie while I worked on curtains for our bedroom. My mom had given us some really pretty curtains a while back, and when I opened them recently there was one curtain and one swag (the long piece of fabric that is draped across the top of the window), and I needed two curtains for our bedroom, so I decided to cut the swag down and make two curtains out of it. I ended up with three curtains – two for our bedroom and one that we’ll put up in the study later on. And they turned out well – which was nice, since I don’t really sew. (As long as it’s flat and has straight edges and right angles, I can usually handle it, though). Then, that night, we had the missionaries from church over for dinner. We added my favorite orzo salad with the raspberry vinegar dressing to our meal that we had planned for that night, bruschetta chicken, since we wanted to have plenty of extra food when we added a couple of hungry teenage boys to our family of good little eaters. The dinner turned out good, but I had to laugh when the missionaries didn’t eat quite as much as I expected, and one of the missionaries who is finishing his mission and going home this week said that he didn’t want a brownie because he was watching his figure. After dinner the missionaries asked if they could teach us one of the lessons that they usually teach to people who want to learn about the church, so they could have some practice teaching it, and the boys enjoyed answering all their questions (and the candy rewards they gave for the answers).

On Thursday we braved the Children’s Museum, even though we had heard on the news earlier in the week that the museum usually gets about 900 people on a normal day, but that this week when all the kids were off of school they were averaging about 37,000 people a day. It was crowded, but not so bad that it wasn’t still fun. We spent a little while in the discovery center, then headed back and walked through the new Lego exhibit (which was quite crowded), and then through the Super Hero area, then we happened upon a Bernstein Bears “town” in a back corner of the museum that we had never seen before. We spent the rest of the time there – the boys loved the area where they could collect the food from Farmer Ben’s farm, put it up a conveyor belt into the barn, then take the food and serve it at a restaurant. We had lunch afterwards (although it took us about 15 minutes to gather enough chairs for all of us to sit down in the food court area). Then we headed to Home Depot before going home, and we picked up three new cans of paint – a green for Camden’s, Kolby’s and Courtland’s room that we chose by coordinating it with the green in a baby quilt that my mom sewed for Kolby when he was a baby, a blue for Eli’s and Isaac’s room that I had color-matched to a color on one of the model airplanes that we have hanging in their room, and a dark brown for the living room. When we got home, I was excited to get started, and I painted part of one of the living room walls, and quickly found out that the color was totally wrong. We had planned to paint the living room a Home Depot color-match to the Restoration Hardware color “flax,” but long story short we turned the entire house upside down and still couldn’t find either the paint sample cards that we had from Restoration Hardware or the actual sample of the paint that we got from my parent’s house, so we decided to try to get a color that seemed close, but it definitely didn’t work. The color we ended up with was like a dark chocolate brown, much, much too dark. I don’t want to waste the paint we got, but I really don’t want to paint the living room such a dark, dark color. So we’ll just have to see if we can figure out some other use for the dark brown paint, and try again on the living room color at a later time. Too bad we don’t have Restoration Hardware here, or we could just run get a paint sample from them. Anyways, after doing that I was on a painting kick, so while Michael got dinner ready I got out the white paint and painted all the wood trim around the doors and windows in Eli’s and Isaac’s room, which some previous residents had painted light blue, and I also did the trim around the windows in the study and the upstairs bathroom (covering up the scratch marks on the wood from the previous owner’s cat), and did a little more touch up on the trim upstairs. I thought that I had finished everything in the house that needed white paint, but have since noticed that the windows in the other bedroom, a vent cover in the blue bedroom, and a couple other spots around the upstairs need a little more, but I’m almost there.

On Friday we enjoyed blueberry waffles for breakfast, and then we headed to the DMV to get the upgraded driver’s licenses that makes it so you can drive into Canada or Mexico from the US without having a passport (because Michael has a work conference in Toronto in April and we think we are all going to go). Then we stopped at Toys’R’Us and let Eli and Courtland use their birthday money from grandparents (we didn’t make it out there earlier because it’s not too close to here). Eli was excited to find a kit of Spy things – binoculars, ‘lasers,’ telescopes, secret message senders, magnifying glasses, etc, which is great because the boys have had lots of fun playing Spys lately. And the boys combined the rest of their birthday money and got one of those fun turtle sand boxes with the lids, so that will be fun to get some sand and let them play with that in the Spring. Then that afternoon we got to go swimming with the boys. It’s the first time our whole family has gone swimming together since we moved here because the Aquatic Center has an annoying rule that requires each child under age 5 to be supervised by an adult – which means that even though Kolby and Eli are both old enough, with Michael and I we cannot go with Camden, Isaac, and Courtland because they each need one on one adult supervision. When we moved here we got a punch pass to swim at the Aquatic Center, thinking that if we wanted to go when Michael was home, we would just have to drop off the baby at the children’s care center there. But last time Michael had time off work we tried to go and the children’s center wasn’t open during pool hours. This time we called and found out that the children’s center was closed all week for the holiday week, so we wouldn’t be able to go at all. Michael ended up talking to the aquatic director, and he said it was kind of like pulling teeth, but he was able to get her to make an exception and allow our family to go swimming together. We had fun and swam for about an hour (would have been longer if the water had been a little warmer for the kids), but they enjoyed the water fountains, the little frog slide, and especially current channel, and Michael got to go down the big water slide (which is actually smaller than the slide they had in Utah that Kolby and Eli loved, but Kolby’s not even tall enough to go on the slide here, but he’s close, so it shouldn’t be too much longer before he gets to go on this one too).

On Saturday morning I got up early and went to the temple, telling Michael when I left that I would paint both the boys’ bedrooms if he taped both rooms while I was gone (yes, I am still on this painting kick, although I am not very enthusiastic about putting up the painter’s tape). When I got home Michael had taped one of the rooms (he realized that taping takes a really long time, and he said the baby was sleeping in the other room so he couldn’t have done it in there anyways), so while he went to the temple I painted Kolby’s, Camden’s, and Isaac’s bedroom. We always get the Behr ‘Paint and Primer in One,’ which we have always been really impressed with – it usually only takes one coat to paint, plus a little touch-up of the spots here and there that we may have missed a little bit. But it’s been great to just paint once and be done with the job. Except when I started painting with this green paint it was as if it was just normal paint – no matter how thick a coat I put on, it still showed white spots through the green paint – I don’t know what the deal was, maybe the previous paint was just really sucking it in or something. Usually for a room that size we would finish painting the whole room and have between 1/4 and 1/3 of the can of paint left over, but this time I used the entire gallon of paint and I’m going to have to go back for another can to finish the room. At least it’s a nice color, once the second coat goes on. Although we chose the color to coordinate with the green in the baby quilt, it just happens to also match perfectly with the green in the rug in their bedroom and the green on the baby’s play pen. It’ll look great when we finish.

Yesterday we had church, then Michael had a short scout meeting, we started to drive home when I realized that I’d forgotten the diaper bag so we went back to church for that, we put the boys down for naps and Kolby helped us prepare some of the food for dinner that night, then Kolby went with Michael to home teach a family from church, then I worked on preparing my lesson that I’m going to be teaching for a family history class at church starting next Sunday, then Michael came home and we had a quick dinner (all of us except Eli and Courtland, who happened to still be sleeping at that time), then Michael headed off to a priesthood meeting in Palmyra, the boys and I cleaned up after dinner and got caught up on dishes, I finished preparing my lesson, and I got Camden and Isaac down for bed while Kolby fell asleep on the family room floor, and Eli finally woke up from his nap (church must have tired him out – he slept for 4 hours) and had dinner, then Michael got home and we watched Amazing Race while I got caught up on sewing all the clothes that have gotten holes in them and grown in a pile in our closet over the last few months. Eli stayed up with us, and then Michael took him up to bed, along with Kolby who was still sleeping on the floor, and we couldn’t believe that Courtland was still asleep! We knew we were in for a long night, because he would surely wake up in the night after that long of a nap, but after checking to make sure he was sleeping alright we just decided to go to bed and get up with him whenever he woke up. Incredibly, he slept all night. That is definitely the longest record for any of our boys – leaving Kolby in the dust with his record of sleeping for 13 hours straight in his baby swing when he was a couple months old – Courtland slept for about 17 hours. I guess all of our adventures over this last week wore him out and he just had to recover, because he has been happy all day today, and even took a good nap again this afternoon. Wow. And he’s also been practicing his walking today – instead of his normal walking for about 4 steps and then dropping down to crawl, he has been walking all the way across the room. I also had the chance to get some more done around the house today – I used spackling to fill in all the old nail holes and little dings in the walls upstairs so we’re all ready to finish painting up there, and I got the last of the wallpaper down in the study. So that feels nice – no more wallpaper!