The rest of the week was pretty boring, in a good way. We took care of Amanda's new kitty until she got back from Salt Lake. We went bike riding, got stacks of books from the library, worked on Sam's polar bears research project, etc. Ben and I had a fantastic dinner at The Spice Room on Friday night (we don't ALWAYS go to the Alamo for dates ;-) I'm still Salivating over their naan and samosas. Today was a long Sunday at home with hyper boys. I'm so so glad we are back to school tomorrow.

The magic of forwarding brought me the family pictures.  Enjoy!

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.

 

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

 

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).

At least he corrected the spelling.

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.

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.

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.