Month: March 2019 (Page 1 of 2)

We met up with all the Waterhouses in Salt Lake City for the first weekend of Spring Break.  The kids were excited to see Andy and Jenn’s house (“we’ve never been there!” they whine at me every other day).  I also wanted them to see some church history sights, and it’s always great to get the family together. It was rainy all weekend but we managed to stay mostly dry.

We walked through Temple Square and looked at the remodeled Church History Museum.  It’s quite different than the one I remember!  The kids enjoyed the treasure hunt for different watches throughout the exhibits.  There was also an art exhibit that had some absolutely wonderful works.

Waffles and frites for elevenses.

I have a lot of pictures from our visit to Dreamscapes.  It’s a walk-through interactive art exhibit.  The kids loved it!

Wall of sequins

Sticker Room

Giant Ball Pit!!!

We braved heavy rains, and then thick snow, to get to the natural history museum on the University of Utah campus.  They had an excellent dinosaur display.

Ben and I and Amanda had some quiet time in the afternoon, but grandparents were going strong.  They took the kids to Tracy Aviary, with a special tour by Jenn who used to work there.  They talked about the birds the whole way home, it must have been a great visit!

Our last night we had dinner at the Arndt’s home.  Martha arranged to have all us Waterhouses and Masons, plus the whole Arndt family, and most of the Cook family clan too!  We haven’t had such a large group of Cook family descendants together for a long time.  I saw Martha snapping pictures, you’ll have to check with her for the evidence 🙂

Today we honored Brian with dinner at Teller’s Taproom, our old neighborhood trivia bar. Ben also gave the kids each a Transformer we saved from Brian’s collection. They were really into them this time (previously the Transformers have been to difficult for them to play with).

Jack’s latest long piano piece is Hedwig’s Theme aka the Harry Potter song.  He’s had it for two weeks.  With the snow days, he put in several extra practice sessions to polish it.

After practicing for a bit, he came up and told me how he wishes his classroom keyboard at the music school had all the same functions as ours, because he likes to use different settings for Hedwig’s theme.

He said he uses “skeefy” for the first pages, then switches to dulcimer.  I asked him to spell skeefy, and he did: “sci-fi” . We had a good laugh.

I took some video of his latest performance:

They canceled school Wednesday and today. Yesterday’s storm was legit awful, but I think they were crazy canceling today. Our area has power and clear roads. It must be the result of a large school district, needing to cancel all for certain areas who are worse off.

We snuck into the library yesterday morning before the storm really unleashed.  Brought home a giant bag of books to last the day.

Lots of Minecraft

Sam has had a cough all week and decided to take a nap after lunch.  I read him a dragon picture book and tucked him into bed with his collection of dragon stuffies.

Heavy, wet snow.  We only got about two inches, but the wind was terrible.  Our lights flickered all day.  We feel lucky we only lost power once for a few seconds.  

Another heated blanket stolen.

Quiet afternoon entertainment.

Today’s school closure felt silly for Arvada.  Oh well.  We all slept in and had a slow start to the day.  Then I mustered the kids into some house cleaning and homework, a Target run, and a quiet time play session upstairs while I worked.

Jack read a book to Sam while he built magnet mansions.

Nimbus was skitterish all day.  Maybe the weather changes, maybe she can’t understand the change to normal routine.

An author, Todd Mitchell, came to Jack’s class and inspired him to write some poetry.  He wrote this after school and asked that I shared it. (I copy/pasted it from his own word document, the typing and style is his own).

Inside me

Inside me live  1000 earths that live of all the suns.

Inside me are 100,000,000,000,000 fish that eat the Earths.

Inside me are some molecules,  that rap all day long.

Inside me are these grins, they jump on any frowns that cross my face.

Inside me there’s a tiger,who takes over when i’m mad.

With all these things inside me, i get very tired. So, please excuse me while I take nap.

My “bake element” caught on fire and corroded last week. I’ve already replaced the circuit board on this oven, about a year after we moved in to this house. So I’m no stranger to appliance repairs. A couple YouTube videos assured me that I was capable of this job.

$70 and a half week of no baking, waiting for shipping, and I have a working oven again! It took less than a single podcast to switch them out.

I was having second thoughts about whether the element really needed resolving. But when I put them side by side, and found a crack that easily split open, I was reassured that it really needed replacing.

I’m going to make Cornish pasties to celebrate!

Here’s the kids after sledding Sunday afternoon. Red cheeks and hot chocolate:

The kids are twins today for spirit week. Perhaps the only duo who wanted to match down to their socks and undies!

Ben has an infamous story about a pencil injury when he was a boy.  He told this story to Sam for the first time and Sam thought it was HILARIOUS.  He declared that he must draw the scene immediately.

I found the drawing later and, without context, was perplexed about its subject.  Ben explained the reference, and then I LOVED the picture.

So for your enjoyment, I had Sam re-tell the pencil story in his own words.  Listen to the tale, and then you can see the illustration below.

Ben in fourth grade.

I realized that my snapshots summary didn’t capture a major part of January and February: musical rehearsals! With Amanda working in the metro area, and rehearsals scheduled during the school day, I’ve been able to come a couple times a week most weeks.

Obviously I don’t take photos during rehearsals, I never have. But this week I had some footage amanda took for the kids to review, and I realized I could screenshot it and remove the kids faces. So here you go, a glimpse into one of my part time jobs. This is our tenth consecutive year working together on a musical!