Embracing Spring Break

I have Spring Break ideas. Big ideas. Ideas that two of the boys are pretty darn excited about. However, one child remains unconvinced of my brilliance and the ultimate awesomeness of my Spring Break plan. One child wants to spend Spring Break in an arcade eating pizza until all his and my money has run out.

 

Jonah conquers his fear of heights and climbs to the top of the look-out tower

Hey you stupid hippies! Get off my lawn!

So we left that one child at home while the rest of us visited Fort Vancouver National Monument today.

You can tell just by looking at this picture we had an awesome time. What gives it away? Well, the sky was blue for one thing. Jonah was given an iron forged hook that he watched a wonderful volunteer blacksmith make. It made his whole week! We were super glad to have some friends along for our first-day-of-spring-break adventure.

After Fort Vancouver, the adventure took us to Mac! Mac & Cheesery. Yep, a whole restaurant dedicated to macaroni and cheese. It was an adventure, but disappointing. One reason was they didn't have the poutine mac and cheese I'd heard so much about. Another reason was because the deep fried mac and cheese balls they served us were jalapeno when I'd specifically asked for plain. But the main reason--the nail in the coffin, so to speak--was the fact that it took one hour to get our meal. One hour and we were the only people in the whole restaurant.

Three different reasons were given for the lateness: the printer was broken (no, I'm not joking, this was an actual reason they gave us), there was a miscommunication in the kitchen, and the dishwasher had gone home and when they finally finished our meal, there were no clean plates to put it on.

(My favorite comment from my friend's daughter: how can a dishwasher go home? It's a dishwasher, not a person. Her mom explained that dishwashers were sometimes people too.)

Anyway, the mac and cheese was fine and it was fun to try something new.

Ethan was very interested in the flint and steel fire start Isaac purchased at the gift shop and quickly got to work trying to start a fire. I provided marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate, but, by that time, it had started to rain, so we had microwave s'mores.

We ended the day by watching Hugo, which was wonderful. I loved it almost more than the book. It was very well done and Ethan's declaration of "that was a good movie," was the perfect, if not very late, end to the first day of Spring Break.