Spring Break and Easter

I just cannot seem to keep up with posting............ this is the third time I have tried to sit down and add some pictures, maybe it will be the charm. 

The girls were out of school for spring break last week.  We did not travel anywhere, but we did make a couple of trips to the beach.  It was the first time that I took all three girls to the beach without Mike.  We did okay, but it is a lot easier to have two adults to supervise the kiddos.  Rachel loves to walk and run up and down the beach and the big girls don't really care for that, so that means that somebody is not going to be happy if just one adult is there to watch.  The weather was absolutely gorgeous.  The wind made for a cool beach at the first of the week, but it was warmer by the end of the week.  Allison has decided that digging is her passion for the moment, and she spent a lot of her beach time digging holes.  Rachel is her nemesis, though, because she loves to fill in holes and can fill them up about as fast as Allison can dig them!  That drives Allison crazy.  We have to dig Rachel her own hole to fill in so that she will leave Allison alone.  We tried out our new skimboard and found out there is much more to it than just throwing it into the surf and jumping on it.  None of us have quite figured it out yet.    

Between our beach trips, the girls dyed Easter eggs and baked cookies.  They had fun doing that, and  I am always surprised at how independent they are getting.  Allison cooked the brownies all by herself! 

Easter was a beautiful day as well. The girls had a good time going through their baskets.  The Easter Bunny always brings new swimsuits, and this year they actually all fit!  The Easter Bunny was very happy about that.  Rachel got a Tag from Leapfrog.  It is a hand held pointer/computer/speaker that reads books out loud-the technology today is amazing.  It is really cool, and she seemed to enjoy it, until it quit working a few hours later.  I finally got around to getting that exchanged yesterday, so hopefully, the new one will keep working for us.  We have not had a chance to hook it up to the computer to download the books yet, but hopefully Mike can do that tonight.  We headed to church Sunday morning and had planned to have an Easter lunch with Grandpa, but plans changed and we ended up going to a sand sculpting festival and headed back to the beach afterwards.  The sand sculpturess were unbelievable and the the beach was relaxing.  The girls got new shovels that were bigger than the older ones they broke during the week, and the hole digging commenced again in earnest when we got to the beach.  

    

 

Monday, the girls begrudgingly headed back to school.  That evening, we had a wonderful visit with some very dear friends.  A friend that Mike has known since sixth grade, was in Florida for the week, and she and her family stopped by to visit with us after their trip to Disney World. It is always great to get together with them, because our kids and their kids are like the Brady Bunch, each kid has a cohort.  Even cooler is that our two youngest both have Ds.  It was so cool watching and listening to them play together and talk to one another.  We could not understand a thing they were saying, but they seemed to know what they were talking about.  It is actually because of this friend that I started this blog. I was always checking in on hers to see what she was up to and decicded to start my own.  You can see her blog at 2 Pirates and a Princess 

   

The rest of the week was spent getting back into the routine of homework, laundry, voluteering and horseback riding.  Rachel was very happy to get back on her horse, Emily!  She talked about Emily all day, Thursday.  Saturday, gymnastics resumes.  I think Rachel will be glad to do that again too.