Ellie birthday twofer

This last week we failed to write a blog post, so this week will be a twofer.

Last week we celebrated Easter by doing activities every single day.

On Monday we remembered Jesus cleansing the temple by playing the game clean up your own backyard. This year that consisted of having a bunch of balled up socks in the carpeted room and making a line down the middle of the room. We divided into two teams and each team attempted to rid their "yard" of socks. Given the fact that in previous years Mike would cheat by hoarding up a bunch of socks and then throwing them all at the same time which was totally unfair we had rules this year to prevent that from happening. By the time that the timer ran out neither team had won, so we ended the game. We made the game 3 minutes this year, however Alison felt that it was still too long. Perhaps next year we will make it shorter.

Caitlin and Sal's kids came over to our house for multiple days this week. Caitlin and Sal were going on a convention trip for their business, and they needed to have us watch their kids for them.

Since they have five children it's doubled the number of children that we have. They also have a young child who is still not fully able to talk so Mike was able to enjoy having a baby again.

Alison comments that having double the number of children is not a problem at all if it weren't for having an extra baby.

For our Easter celebration on Tuesday we all sat down in the carpeted room and watched The Prince of Egypt, which is a movie that we watch every year to learn about the history of the Passover.

On Wednesday we celebrated the Passover by having a traditional, sort of, Seder dinner.

It was snowing for the early few days of the week, so when we went up to Mill Creek canyon in order to visit our picnic site that we like we discovered that there were eight feet of snow blockading the exit of the parking lot, and most of the parking lot was entirely covered with snow as well. Because of this we were unable to get into the picnicking site so we ended up going down to Crestwood park instead we had hot dogs and cooked s'mores and had a good picnic in memory of Jesus Christ going to the garden of Gethsemane.

We had invited the water family over for the picnic, so there were 16 children at the park. The waters arrived a little bit late, however other than that things went fairly smoothly. Also had to leave early to babysit, because, for The first time she was asked to babysit for someone outside of our family.

She watched a 7-month-old and a two and a half year old and had a great time. She is looking forward to babysitting again in the future, so tell your friends that there's a new babysitter in town.

During the picnic rocket seems to have gotten a hold of so many hot dogs that it caused him to throw up.

On Friday we took all of the kids to nature group Mike had to drive part of them so that we were able to all get there. It turned out to be Allison and 13 children in the wilderness since none of the other moms were going to stay that week. Luckily the weather was perfect and all of the children had fun.

On Friday night Caitlin and Sal came back to our house to pick up their kids. They were very happy to have gone on their trip, and we had a good time watching them apart from the fact that the baby didn't sleep at night. Our kids are already wanting to get back together with their kids for more fun.

On Saturday we did an egg hunt with the waters. Both Alison and Brock hid the eggs in rather difficult places, so we ended up searching for eggs for like an hour. Some of the eggs have still not been found to this day.

Sunday we did an Easter walk with the Plastows and Browns and had our traditional Easter feast. It was a good Easter.

Mike bought tickets to the new Mario movie, so on Tuesday we all went together as a family to see the movie. This was the first time that some of our kids have seen a movie in theaters, and it certainly is the first time since covid for all of them. Everyone enjoyed the movie, and they did a really good job of putting in things from all of the Mario movies, so Mike liked it a lot as well. If you haven't seen it we would recommend it.

What with a week of having cousins over and a week of Easter preparation and stuff we had not sufficiently prepared for the end of year celebration.

This year the kids are making Bridges out of straws and tape, and towers out of straws and tape. The goal of the bridge is to hold the most weight and the goal of the tower is to be the highest. They are also building egg drops so that they can drop eggs without the eggs cracking. No two of them have the same method that they are planning on using, so when they actually do the egg drop we will tell you whether they are successful.

We have also been spending a lot of time on the memory work that they are going to recite during it. Ray and Sarah also spent many hours preparing for their history presentations.

This last Thursday Mike also attended board game design guild meeting for the second time since covid. He had his game played and the people left some feedback. It was useful, but not as useful as it sometimes is since one of the players decided he was going to try to play the game in a very poor manner to see if it handled players doing poorly and Mike was more interested in seeing how the balance was when players were trying to play fairly competently.

Friday Mike got off of work, (his boss set a goal for the week, and they got things done by Friday, so the whole team took Friday off.) Because of that, Mike went to nature group on Friday. The kids built bridges out of logs and stuff like that. Mike rarely gets to go to nature group, so it was fun.

For our Friday date night Mike and Alison got tacos from a nearby Taco truck and hold up in our room watching avatar The last Airbender episodes. Rhea made dinner for the kids fed them and put on a movie for them and then put them to bed, so we paid her for babysitting them. It's nice having a built-in babysitter.

Sara went to a birthday party on Friday for her friend Ellie, and then on Saturday Rea and Sara both went to cousin Ellie's birthday party. They also worked on building a claw machine.

When asked about today Timmy said: "Today was the worst day ever. We went to Grandma and Grandpa's house. And I exploded. Twice."

None of that is true, however sometimes that's just how things are.