Grandma & Val Came to Visit!

We were so excited that Katie’s 8th birthday would coincide with our spring break and that my Mom and Val would be able to come up and enjoy both with us.  Unfortunately the weather didn’t look the best for doing much outdoors.

They arrived on Tuesday, April 10 – the Tuesday above with the rainy cloud.   And stayed through Monday morning – the last day of the rainy clouds.

Katie and Drew were anxiously waiting by the office window to catch the first sights of them arriving, then when they saw them pull up to the house they took off running.

Shortly after they arrived we overloaded the van and went to Ben & Jerry’s for free cone day.  The wait wasn’t long at all and the ice cream was of course delish.

Since the sun was shining we decided to go to a nearby park to let the kids play for a bit.  Well it wasn’t just the kids playing.  I took advantage of big swing set and both everyone, including Grandma and Val, joined the kids on the seesaw – Val even wearing his full chest brace as he’s still recovering from his injuries from falling down the stairs in November.

Tonight we used one of our T-Mobile Tuesday credits and rented Goodbye Christopher Robin – which was a pretty interesting flick.

Wednesday morning Abigail had a dental appointment down in Auburn to fill two of “several” cavities she had at our last cleaning.  We dropped Abigail off at the dentist and went to my favorite breakfast joint – Sunbreak Café.  We filled our bellies while they filled Abigail’s decaying teeth.

After breakfast we popped over to the outlet mall to see if we could find a baptism dress for Katie.  We ended up buying one at Burlington Coat Factory but once back home Katie decided she liked Abigail’s baptism dress better so Grandma put her sewing skills to work and altered Abigail’s dress to fit Katie.

On our way home from Auburn we stopped to visit Justin and Jason at the Chick-fil-A First 100 event in Covington.  They were camping out for 24 hours to earn 52 free meals.  Had my Mom not been in town I would have for sure been camping along side them.  It certainly wasn’t the best of weather for camping in a parking lot so I really wasn’t sad about missing out. 

Our view of the Chick-fil-A campers

Drew on the other hand was pretty bummed to not be able to stay with the boys. The rest of us made our way back to the car unaware that Drew was sitting on the curb pouting.

That evening we introduced Grandma and Val to The Greatest Showman.  They hadn’t seen it yet and we were excited to watch it again since the kids hasn’t seen it since we went over Christmas break.  Everyone loved it.

Thursday morning we watched my niece Kaitlyn Hipwell on Good Morning America – she participated in a casual Les Mis rendition on Easter with her boyfriend’s family and the video went viral.  They’ve been featured on several Utah news stations and even on a national level.  It was fun to see her doing what she loves.

The Chick-fil-A opening also made the news.  I posted these clips in my Instagram stories…

You can’t visit Snoqualmie without visiting the Falls.  There was a sign at the top of the hiking trail down to the falls that said the trail was closed, but another hiker said she went last week and it was open so we decided to walk down anyhow.  And it was closed.  Bummer.  But we got a few pictures at the upper viewpoints.  It was very misty.

This afternoon the girls and I went to the temple with Grandma to perform 67 family baptisms she had brought with her.  Carly also had a baptism she had prepared.  It was wonderful to be in the temple with my Mom and two of my daughters.  We all participated in the baptisms, which I don’t think I’d done since I was a youth.  A neat experience!

We waited and waited for Justin to get home from work so we could all go to dinner at MOD Pizza.  Not sure how impressed my Mom was with the thin crust pizza, but my kids were thought it was a real treat.  I don’t think we’ve taken them since it opened and they were offering 50% off everything.  Yum!

Friday and Saturday deserve posts of their own.  So spring break with the Keslers to be continued…

Conference Weekend & Easter Sunday

The day before Easter was a big day of baking.  It was conference weekend and we have a tradition of having cinnamon rolls for breakfast during conference.  We were also in charge of bringing dessert to Easter dinner with the Fletcher family so I baked a cream cheese carrot cake.  Then we had some bananas to use up so banana bread was baked as well.  Yum, yum!

We enjoyed conference…

Ha!  Actually it was a great conference.  It was neat to be able to participate in the solemn assembly and raise our hands to sustain our new prophet President Nelson.  Justin was at Carly’s lacrosse game during the sustaining and he and another LDS couple stepped a bit aside and as they listened to conference they too raised their hands to sustain the prophet.  A neat opportunity for sure.

We had a fun surprise for the kids on Easter morning.  They’ve come to expect to wake up and find eggs hidden around the downstairs.  Much like Christmas they have to wait upstairs until we give them the go ahead.  They’re still squishing together on the same step.

It didn’t take long for the kids to discover that most of the eggs had a little slip of paper inside.  It did however take them longer than I expected for them to figure out what it all meant.  They sat around the bar taping the papers together for quite a while.  Katie and Drew did more eating of candy than helping.

The big surprise was announcing to the kids that we would be heading to Europe this summer!  It took Abigail a while to figure out that the numbers coordinated with the names of each location and were in the order of the countries we would visit.  Finally the kids got the pieces put together.  We also had a gift wrapped – Ticket to Ride the Europe version.  We thought it would be a fun game to play as we prepare for our big adventure.  We’ve been planning this trip to Europe since February 2017, but the girls didn’t know we’d finalized it.  Last they knew we were waiting to accumulate enough points to cover all of our airfare, which were able book in October.  It’s been a hard secret to keep and I was so relieved to finally have it out in the open.

On the Paris, France paper there is a small footnote that reads, “(Only Holly, Abigail and Carly)” however we joked that it was only me and Abigail because we didn’t find the egg with the paper that included the “Carly” bit.  It wasn’t until a few weeks later that we found the last missing eggs so I guess Carly gets to join Abigail and I after all.

All cozied up for conference.

With a little conference Bingo.

After the Sunday afternoon session of conference we headed down to Justin’s parents house for Easter dinner.  We found Grandpa sitting at the kitchen table filling plastic eggs with candy.  Abigail was excited to jump in and help him.  It’s fun to see how her role in these sorts of activities changes as she matures – she seems to find just as much joy in organizing and helping as she did participating. 

Hunters ready?

Of course there has to be sorting afterward

Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt

Our neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt started at 10am on the Saturday before Easter.  Abigail works on Saturdays and Justin was with Carly at her lacrosse game so it was just the three younger kiddos and me.  Jason and Katie were assigned to hunt at a different playground than Drew’s age group.  They were all so excited and collected lots of eggs, though to our disappointment it seemed this year there were mostly non-food toys in the eggs which either ended up in the trash or in the DI donation box.

We stayed at the park for afterward for a bit – people brought food to share and they had a piñata, balloon-makers, and a popcorn machine.

The gal that has organized the event the past couple years is moving – she’s a realtor and I suspect the booming housing market has given her and her husband plenty of reason $$$ to move onto bigger and better.  Apparently there’s someone lined up already to step in and organize the egg hunt in the future – hopefully they keep it on Saturday so we can enjoy it while we still have little kids that look forward to it.