Saturday's Spring Break Adventure

We had visitors!

My sister Gina and her kids came to stay and play with us for the weekend. She has five kids, ages 10, 8, 7, 5, and 3!

Our first adventure Saturday was Cooper's first soccer game! It was a lot of fun and very cute watching those four year olds running up and down that field with really no idea what they should be doing!

Our original plan was to head to the Oregon Zoo, but it was turning out to be a pretty rainy day, so we altered our plans and headed to:

We had a great afternoon checking out all of the exhibits and hands on experiments. The big success of the day was when the older boys (Jesse, 10, and Ben and Caleb both 8) led the building of the dinosaur skeleton. All of the pieces were scattered and buried in the sand in a 12'x6' area. There was over 75 pieces and each was numbered.

After much trial and error the boys were able to get the skeleton nearly complete. They were missing two very critical pieces that made it impossible to complete the entire skeleton, but they had fun and worked together well!

We spent about five hours exploring and playing at OMSI and were not even able to get to it all!

After OMSI, we headed out Hwy 26 for a gourmet meal at:

We don't do much drive-thru eating, mostly because I can't stand the mess in the car, so the great novelty for us was ordering right from our car, having it delivered to the car and eating it in the car! The boys also loved seeing a car-hop on rollerskates.

Hello Yummyness on my dashboard!

That is the Sonic Burger with cheese, lettuce, tomatoe, pickles, onions, ketchup and mayonaise. It was good (for a fast food burger). Sonic is famous for it's drink menu.....and there was so much to choose from. It was a tough choice, but all the boys went for the Cherry Slush and I went for the highly reommended Route 44 Cherry Dr. Pepper. 44oz. is a lot of soda!! But it was yummy with all that crunchy, crushed ice! Dave and I also shared an order of onion rings, which neither of us were to fond of. They tasted like they were fried in sugar water.

I will be hitting the treadmill tomorrow afternoon to run off that burger and huge soda!

Sonic was a fun treat, but it was 30 miles from our house, so probably not somewhere we will frequent. I have heard rumor that there is one opening on the other side of our town this summer.......

There was one last bonus Spring Break Adventure for Dave and Ben today. A very good friend of Dave's has season tickets to the Portland Trailblazers and was not able to use today's tickets so he gave them to Dave. He and Ben got to watch the Blazers lose to the San Antonio Spurs. During half time all kids under 16 were invited onto the floor to shoot a free throw and it was LeMarcus Aldridge bobble head night. How fun for Ben!

Heading into Spring Break Benjamin was struggling with a bit of envy because a lot of his classmates and friends were heading out of town for vacations. He was sad that we were not able to go somewhere this Spring Break. I reminded him that we had been blessed with a trip to Disneyland recently, and that we would be able to have a lot of fun together even at home this week. I then decided to work very hard at being intentional with him this week. Each day I went to work in the morning and Dave stayed home with the boys. Most days the boys pitched in to get work done around the house before I got home so that we could spend the afternoon playing. They cleaned their rooms and their bathroom , pulled weeds and vacuumed out the cars. Our adventures were not expensive, in fact most days we spent less than $10 for that days adventure because we had coupons, free passes, or the destination was free. Saturday was our most expensive day with Omsi and Sonic. It was not hard planning adventures as long as we were flexible to work with the weather.

Tonight, when I was tucking Ben in, he told me that it had been a great week. When I asked him what made it a great week, he said "spending a lot of time together."

This week I made it a point to hold Ben's hand while we walked and hug him often, because I know that we are getting closer to the age where that will not be cool anymore.

You know our kids grow up so quickly. I challenge you all to be intentional with your kids. A fun and fancy vacation is great, but just spending time with our kids is all they really want!