Brooke's Duet Wins First!

Brooke had a dance competition this weekend, and her duet with Olivia won FIRST PLACE!  They crushed it!  The best part is that they had so much fun dancing together, and they worked so hard.  It was fantastic!  Here they are with their teacher and choreographer, miss Aikman.

I've got a new picture of Grayson from school.  They worked on this scene of the Last Supper, which, once Grayson brought it home became his computer.  He sure loves to play on his computer now.

The kids prepared and put on a whole dance show for this week.  They had a solid 10 dances, with solos and duets and all of them up there together.  Some of the dances were really fun, like Brooke and Grayson doing their snake dance together.  I'm not sure if I've said enough stuff to give links to all the videos, but hopefully I have by now.

On Friday we headed down to New Braunfels for Brooke's dance competition.  On Friday night she just had her duet with Olivia, which went great!  As mentioned they won first place, and also did this cartwheel thing.

Grayson did his best to stay entertained throughout the show, including rolling a pencil down this side aisle over and over.  He really liked doing this, and the other people sitting on the end were pretty entertained as well.

Here's Brooke on stage accepting her award during the awards ceremony.

I helped bring the good luck by parking in the  Nyan-cat decorated parking spot.  Thank you Oliver, you really helped us out.

We got a hotel room for the night since Brooke had a dance on Friday and Saturday.  Grayson noticed the pool out the windows and climbed right in there to get a better view.  This was between games of "the floor is lava."

On Saturday Brooke had her two company dances, jazz and lyrical.  Her team did a fantastic job, and they were very fun to watch.

When we returned home, we found Jelly laying in a basket of clean towels.  This is also probably where she was when we left, and probably where she is as I'm writing this, unless we put them away by now.  In fact, Monica DIDN'T put the towels away so that Jelly could lay there while we were gone.

The kids sang a song for Easter in Sacrament meeting on Sunday.  What beautiful voices.

And we had resurrection rolls for our treat after FHE.  It's essentially a roll with a marshmallow in the middle, and then after you bake it they're empty inside.

It was a pretty dance heavy week with Brooke's competition over the weekend, and the kids working so hard to put on a show for us during the week.  It's amazing Brooke didn't start busting out the wrong moves at some point through all of that!
 

Hot Springs, Cold Air

OH MY!!! You caught me in the tub!  Just give me one second.... there.  Well hello from beautiful Hot Springs AR!  We're here for a lovely time of rest and relaxation for spring break.  Please, come join us and take a load off!

Monday, we were all set for outdoor adventure.  The weather was very cooperative with a high of ~40 degrees.  It did mean that every hot spring we saw was worth stopping and admiring and warming up a bit at.

By the hot springs is bath house row, and I believe most of the springs flow into one of those buildings.  There are a few outside, but I think for the most part they're inaccessible without paying.  One of the bath houses has been turned into a museum, and we took a tour through it.  Here we are in the dressing rooms.

I got to a take a nice soak in one of the tubs, ahhhhhhh.  It was fun to look around, and it's always interesting to see how much bigger things have gotten over time.  They had rooms that people would stay in that were barely larger than their beds (which were also smaller than a twin bed).  In general the rooms were smaller than they are now, etc.  I think part of why it seems interesting to me is that I feel like now a days if you went to stay somewhere like this you'd feel anxiety about being stuck in such a small room!  A little off from the relaxation they're aiming for.

There were also these little fountains in the lobby.  I'm guessing at one point water came out of them, but I think at one point a LOT of the building had a lot more water going on.

After our tour, we went across the street to Bubbalicious for lunch.  It was a burger joint, and it was fantastic!  Good enough that I wanted to include a picture to document it.

After lunch we kept our water cups and headed to a hot spring tap to make some hot chocolate.  Yum.

I really like where we went.  There was just a faucet sticking out of the side of a wall/staircase with hot water constantly flowing out.  The water was the perfect temperature, however, our planning was a bit less than ideal.  While we had recently acquired cups and brought hot chocolate mix, we had no utensil to stir things up, and were about a 5-10 minute walk to the car.  So with our cups full we bustled over to the car to finally mix up our... chilled chocolate.  To the mix's credit, it was still SOOO good!

We drove up to the top of the hill where the hot springs are and there was an observation tower.  This is actually where the bath tub in the first picture was as well.  

We thought we could just climb the stairs to the top of the tower, but you actually had to pay, so only those who really wanted to go up did.  I ended taking Winry and Grayson to the top.  It was very windy up there, and still a cold day, so we didn't stay for too long.

And here's the tower looming over us on our way back to the car.

The secondary theme of this trip was kickball.  We had a good sized backyard at the place we were staying, and we used it.  Maybe I've just told this story out loud too many times, but I feel like I wrote about playing too much kickball that my leg started to swell form the impact of kicking the ball.  Maybe that's new here though.  It was cold enough that when we played in the morning the ball seemed deflated, and in the afternoon it was normal.  But no matter the temperature or inflation state, it was always a good time.

While driving into town, we saw a trail along the river next to the road, so in the afternoon we headed over for a walk.  It was a very nice walk, and the kids enjoyed throwing rocks and stick in the water. Especially when they could push big things off a bridge.

Tuesday was a bit warmer, but also our first chance to head to the children's museum.  There were a lot of fun things to do there and everyone had a fantastic time.

I even tried my hand at doing sick tricks for the kids.

Outside they had a dinosaur walk where there were statues of dinosaurs and signs to tell you about the various beasts on display.  Grayson loves a good dinosaur.

After the museum, we headed for the quartz mine.  In my mind this is the main reason we came to Hot Springs for our break.  Here's everyone heading into the entrance.

This is a real and active quartz mine.  Essentially they pit mine out all the stuff they want, and then drive their dump trucks over and dump out all the stuff they don't want, which happens to be chock full of quartz.  I don't know if it's of insufficient quality or quantity, but there's quartz just all over that you can dig up and take home.

I even found this huge rock that had a few inches thick of quartz growing on it.  They told us we could keep anything we could haul out. I didn't even try with this one, but I felt like this seemed like it should have been valuable enough to be desired, right?

But all that said, it was pretty rare to get a clear quartz, so maybe that's where the real money is.  Brooke found this one that is quite large though!

Back at the house we capped off the evening finishing this puzzle we found in the closet.  It was missing just the right number of pieces, and had an appropriate number of leaves in trees being reflected in a river, to make it a DIFFICULT finish!  Good job Oriah for persevering.

On our way out of town we decided to try the hot chocolate one more time.  We stopped at the store to get cups and spoons to be properly prepared, and we even found this place where there are like 10 hot water spouts.  We got to drink the chocolate while it was HOT this time!  The water was pretty much the perfect temperature for making hot chocolate as it was perfect for drinking once the mixing was done.

We also jumped across town to a cold water spout to fill up our water bottles before leaving.  Turns out it's BUSY there.  You can see that someone had like 20 giant bottle in the back of their car.  One of the spouts is too small for these large bottles, so we were able to cut the line and fill up.

On the drive home we stopped in Texarkana for a picture at the state line.  It's like we're half way home, and half still on vacation.  But actually, we're just on vacation still :).

Our next stop was Paris, Texas to see the Eiffel Tower.  Nice!  And then we stopped and got some ice cream before returning the rest of the way to the Albrights.

I worked from the Albrights house on Thursday and the kids had a great time playing together.  Brooke and Winry started working on flips, and right before we left I went out to see if I've still got it as well, and the answer was yes!

The drive home went well, though there was a bit of traffic and we got slowed down multiple times.  The highlight for me was probably looking back at Grayson eating a twizzler while still trying to play Mario.  Who needs to jump?

Jelly always misses us when we're gone, and even just being gone for a few days she was happy to see us back.  She usually want's to be pet a bunch, and sometimes gets a little playful.

On Saturday we went to Lago Vista for a hike.  We drove right by Oskis!  Who knew.  Seems like we need to do some rural grocery shopping next time Oriah comes to visit.

Here we are taking a break on a bench that was built along the trail.  Sadly, the bench was in the sun and it was getting pretty warm.  However, it was a good lookout over the country side.

The goal of the hike was to see a Golden Cheeked Warbler, which is a bird that only lives in this area.  It migrates to Mexico for the winter, but they're coming back.  Monica played the bird call for us, and we kept hearing one as we were hiking.  They're pretty small and like to be up in the top of the trees.  I was able to catch one 3 times I think.

After the hike, we went to BB Shine's to wash the car, and then to Jeremiah's to help us cool off.  I don't think we've ever had a bad time at Jeremiah's. I see it when I drive to the train and had just been thinking we were due for another trip, and it knocked it out of the park yet again! 

We had an awesome spring break and I love that the we were able to join up with the Albrights for a week full of kickball, hot chocolate, and quartz digging.
 

Almost Spring Break

Hello from Buc-ee's, Melissa TX, the happiest place on earth!  Especially when Buc-ee himself comes out to say hello!  Yes, we find ourselves in Dallas at the end of this week, visiting Michael and Oriah and getting ready to continue out travels into Arkansas for spring break!

Rewinding back a little, the dirt for the planter beds was delivered this week, so I got out and did some shoveling!  It was a lot of dirt to move, and I think each planter box ended up getting around 9ish wheelbarrows full.  We fortunately had a few extra 2x4's I could use as a makeshift ramp or else it would have taken forever to shovel all the dirt back out in the backyard.  Fortunately, I had Grayson there to coach and assist me through the process.  It took 3 evenings after work, working until sunset, but I got it all done.

Here's Grayson and Lincoln walking to the car after preschool, being best friends!

The hawk is back!  And it's definitely got something in it's talons here.

Winry went on a field trip to a farm this week.  She was over the moon!  While they were there, they got to meet a bunch of animals, and there was a pregnant goat.  They told the kids not to bother the pregnant goats, but that if it came to them it was okay.  The pregnant goat loved Winry and come and let her pet it, and when Winry sat down it came and curled up next to her!

Winry also had the chance to learn some lasso basics.

And all that excitement was about as much as she could handle, and she completely zonked out on the bus ride home.  Super thanks to the parent that took these great pictures for us!

Winry had a spirit week at school as well, so one day she got to dress like a storybook character.  The book she picked was Little House in the Big Woods.  She's looking good.

They also had a field day and the Valor games, where the school is divided into 4 teams that all compete against each other.  Monica volunteered to eat the kids snacks, I mean, hand out snacks, and so got to enjoy watching the festivities as well.

On Saturday we drove up to Dallas and stopped at the temple on our way to Michael and Oriah's house.  While Monica was in, we were busy looking for bugs and exploring the grounds.  We took a roly poly with us for a walk.

And here we are out in front of the temple.

After a loop around, the kids wanted to go sit in the car. A short while later Monica came out.  We swapped and I headed in, and everyone else went back up to the front for another picture!

We of course had to stop at Buc-ees since it was so close by, and Grayson really wanted to go over and see the statue.  I guess he also wanted to get bit.

Biskit was being extra friendly and wanted nothing more than to keep my hand close by.  If I moved my arm from this position, he'd wind his head around my arm until we got back to this position again.

Grayson brought Narly with us, and found more members of his pod!  The Albrights had won some whales at Lagoon last year, and they welcomed Narly to their pod with open fins.  Narly was happy to not be alone.

On Sunday morning, Grayson enjoyed leaping into the loving embrace of a luv sac.  He did this over and over and was having the time of his life.

We joined the Albrights at church where Jonathan did an amazing job playing the organ in sacrament meeting. After church we jumped in our cars and headed off for Hot Springs AK, our spring break destination!