More Spring Break: The Part Without the Glitter

In addition to art projects coming out the wazoo in my house during spring break, my kids and I also managed to fritter some time away being silly.  We did lunch out several times.  One such outing led us to the glamorous world of Chick Fil A.  Rather than limiting our fun to the 20 minute long wait in the drive thru, I actually agreed to exit the car and go inside. 

My 9 year old has outgrown kids meals and their cheap crappy toys made in China but my 7 year old still enjoys them.  Unless we are at Chick Fil A where they have a tendency to go the more educational route with their toys.  He once got a little book about the solar system in one of their kids meals and he looked like he wanted to chuck it back over the counter.  But the toy this time was a game with cards with pictures on them and you try to tell a story based on the cards in your hand. 

We didn’t bother to read the instructions though and winged it and there was a boat in the middle of the dessert with a cheetah that eats bananas.  It was amusing.  We killed a good ½ hour of daylight and the kids were actually bummed when I suggested it was time to get up off the sticky plastic chairs and go home.   Thumbs up.  And proof that having fun can be cheap and easy.  

Next up were daily dance breaks.  My daughter took maybe six months of tap lessons several years ago before declaring it a complete waste of her valuable time.  It's interesting that she now consider herself ready for So You Think You Can Dance.   But we cranked the tunes up loud and pretended to agree with her.  

Selling it is all in the facial expressions.

Another day my son wanted to tango.  I’m a little unclear on where this kid learned the word “tango” let alone any part of how to do it.  However, I feel confident there are few things in life that will warm your cold black heart more than your 7 year old son leading you in a ballroom dance.   

 I seriously wanted to squeeze that kid and never let him go.  So stinkin’ cute.  Those are definitely the moments that help you weather the temper tantrum on the staircase later that afternoon over how unjust apple slices are for snack and how he will absolutely, positively, die if you make him feed the dogs two nights in a row.   

My daughter was less about the tango and more about the spinning.  Lots and lots of spinning.  If you can giggle while you spin, even better.

Mid spin.  When your photographer is 7, you're just happy he got some people's faces in the shot.

More quality 7 year old photography at work but I love how delighted she looks spinning me.

Just what I've always wanted.  This and 5 other shots of my droopy butt in droopy sweat pants mid spin. Also courtesy of the 7 year's old fine, fine photography skills.

To mix things up a little, we also hit up the park and enjoyed some nice weather.  The plan was to hit a new park we’d never been to.  I decided to add 15 minutes of U-turns to the operation to keep things fresh.  

Once there, everyone piled on the merry go round.  Our crew loves a good merry go round.  I tried really hard to spin it around fast enough to fling my children off face first into the ground much like we did several years ago (Mother of the year! Watched my husband do it! Wish I had video of our horrified expressions when the three year old spun off into gravel.).  Too bad the merry go round makers of the world got tired of getting sued and decided to build in a safety feature that limits how fast it will spin no matter how much sweat you work up trying to push that thing. Naturally, without the element of danger looming in the air, my kids were bored within three minutes so we moved on to the see saw.  

 My son quickly set to work trying to arrange a trip to the emergency room for stitches in his forehead.  

His forehead somehow went unscathed so then he tried for an emergency trip to the dentist by nearly knocking all his teeth out.

 Complete. Train.  Wreck.

Eventually, the playground lost its allure.  But since the park had a sidewalk and some trees, I declared it nature walk time and we marched around looking at stuff.  We brainstormed fairy names for everything we saw based on my 9 year old’s love of Rainbow Magic fairies.  I feel like Bertha the Bathroom Fairy was my best work but Bushy the Shrub Fairy wasn’t half bad either.  I gave him a whole back story about being the nice older brother of the bad guy in the books and mentioned that he and I are close personal friends.   I find that tall tales are most convincing when you have an attention to detail.

We like to do all our nature walking in single file lines.

The nature walk ground to a complete halt when my son successfully stumbled and nearly impaled himself on the walking stick he had found.  Again.  See above.  Complete.  Train. Wreck.

 

Back in the safety of our own home, we rented the hell out of some movies during the week.  I’m here to report that Back to the Future requires a lot of adult explanation to help the 9 year old get the jokes and the 7 year old may or may not have wandered out of the room during it.  On the other hand, any of the Beverly Hills Chihuahua movies are self explanatory in their entirety and wildly popular with my children.    

All in all, it was a fun week.  Sometimes holding down a full time job, I find myself falling into the trap of saving all my days off for going on an actual trip or running a specific errand.  This is my second year in a row spending spring break goofing off at home.  It reminds me how nice it is to stay in my pajamas until noon on Wednesday.  It also reminds me to appreciate the smaller moments with my kids.   The moments I'm pretty sure I'll miss the most once they're grown up and have forgotten that I exist.

Two thumbs way up.  Highly recommend.