Sera's birthday presents

Since my birthday is on Easter Sunday this year, we decided to celebrate on Saturday (while still saving the cake for the official day on Sunday).

Alice made me a birthday banner out of the inside paper tube of a role of wrapping paper.

Zac made delicious pancakes for breakfast.

We opened gifts.  Alice made me a pink 3-D platypus (my spirit animal).

Simon wrapped up two pencils, a role of tape, and a sparkly golden pen for me.

Zac, as always, got me a thoughtful selection of things we needed and a few fun things.

Alice and I have matching hair curls!

The kids struggled a little to play the game, but we can do it just for fun.

I asked Simon if he could read his shirt. After he did, he asked what it meant. When I explained what a "born legend" was, he asked, "Mom, how did my shirt know that about me?"

But the best present I got was the backyard play area and swings, which I'd been wanting for a long time in a vague sort of "I wish we had something fun for the kids in our backyard" way. Zac did a great job making my vague vision happen!

Spring Break Day #5: Rainy stay-home day

Friday was rainy and stormy.  I sent the kids out to the backyard for about 15 minutes in the morning between bouts of rain, but that was all the outdoor time they got.

So they did puzzles and art and we played games. It was actually a fun day. It's nice now that Simon can follow the rules of simple games.

After supper, we watched Totoro.

Spring Break Day #4: Hemlock Bluffs

On Thursday, I didn't really have a plan. I was exhausted from going to the zoo the day before and then staying up so late from the coffee. I'd tried to sleep in, but it didn't really work with the kids making a ruckus.  So I was grumpy.

But two things made me happy. In Alice's room, I noticed she'd built a horse out of the magnets by following the instructions in the booklet all by herself.

And I'm always happy to see evidence of reading in bed in the mornings (imagine that luxury!).

When I got downstairs, I found this funny scene on the kitchen table:

The story was something about Zac gave Alice breakfast before he left for work, but Simon wasn't up yet, so Alice got Simon his breakfast, but at some point they traded meat, and it was originally Alice's sausage but she gave it to Simon.  Anyway, he ended up eating it.

I forget exactly why, but the kids were annoying me all morning. I was hoping to have an easy stay-home day to recover from the zoo, but Alice just kept asking to watch videos.  So I decided that since the weather was absolutely gorgeous, we should go for a hike. So after lunch I took them to nearby Hemlock Bluffs and had fun and took a nice little hike. Nature to the rescue!

That evening, our backyard playground got its next addition: swings down by the pond! (We hired a guy to install them. Here's his detailed youtube video explaining the swings.)

Also, that night, Simon finally finished reading the second Dick and Jane book. He loved reading it, but we are happy he is finally done with it!

He really liked that it had so many pages and a Table of Contents. He would spend half his reading time just flipping back and forth.  (And yes, we know, his toenails need trimmed.)

Spring Break Day #3: Zoo

On Wednesday morning, I got up early and drove us to the zoo. We got there around 9:30, it was open until 5pm. We hadn't been there in about two years, so I was hoping the kids would do a better job actually looking at the animals this time around. They sort of did.

My plan was to prevent breakdowns by making the kids snack and drink regularly. It still failed because even although Simon ate breakfast at home, had a banana and fruit bar on the car on the 90 minute ride to the zoo, and had a cheese stick near the gorilla play area, he still had an epic crying breakdown before we even got to the lions around 11:15 am. What set him off was that he was playing on some rocks, and wanted to play there forever, but after about 5 minutes I said it was time to go. A ten minute crying episode ensued. Here's a picture of the lion enclosure that  Alice took while I tried to console Simon and convince him to eat his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Eventually he stopped crying, ate, and felt better.

Alice was eating an apple slice while we looked at baboons, and her tooth fell out.

Finally around 2 pm we'd gone all around the zoo (only skipping the desert dome because the kids said they were already too hot).  We got to the zoo's two wonderful play areas with 3 hours left. Perfect.

We left right at closing time, and dined at a nearby Chik-Fil-A for supper. I got a cup of coffee so I wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel on the drive home. It worked great, except that I was up until 2:30 am wide awake.

Simon's Drawers

With the onset of warmer weather, I rearranged and reorganized Simon's dresser drawers, much to his confusion. I still make "outfit packets" for him, where I fold together sets of shirts and pants that match, to make mornings easier. With the change in weather, I made one drawer with T-shirts and pants, and another drawer with T-shirts and shorts. Simon couldn't tell the difference and one morning was very sad because he couldn't find any pants and I found his room strewn with long sleeve shirts.  Something had to be done.

So while he took a shower, I labelled one drawer "pants" and another drawer "shorts." As I explained the labeling to Simon, he still seemed confused. Then it became clear that he wanted me to make the labels more accurate. I had to add "T-shirts" to each label. And I had to label all the drawers.

But even that wasn't sufficient.  The next morning, I noticed he'd added the word "long" to the pants label.

Spring Break Day #2: Playdate with Parker

Parker came over for a playdate on Tuesday. The kids helped me clean up the house a bit in the morning and we made a run to the grocery store, then Parker came around 11:30. I had envisioned she and Alice would play all day and I would have some free time, but it turned out to be a high-maintenance day. Normally we have leftovers for lunch, but whenever Parker comes for lunch, I make fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. Not tons of work, but more than normal. I also boiled eggs so that we could dye them later.

After lunch, we did the egg dying and decorating. I'd found some kits at the grocery store that morning that looked promising. The colors worked really well, but the stickers and decorations did not. The kids had fun anyway.

Then, after I cleaned up all the egg stuff, I made the kids a fire with s'mores in the back yard.

Later, after Parker left, Elli came over and she and Simon played with the kinetic sand. It made a big mess on the floor (as it always does), but at least they cleaned it up.

A side effect of the sand is that even after we sweep it up, it leaves the linoleum floor really slippery.  Unfortunately, this resulted in Alice having an epic wipe-out while carrying the cups we'd used for egg dying to the sink.