Savannah was Sally Ride for the 4th grade wax museum. She had one of the best costumes (even though I put in together the night before). I ended up finding a pair of pants and shirt at the thrift store that matched each other and loosely stitching some paper labels on the shirt. A friend of ours happened to have an astronaut helmet. Savannah has been doing a bracelet club with a couple of friends. She wants to start a "fun club" at our house for crafts and baking.
Alex and I had a date night one evening since we drove Jared, Owen, and a couple of the young women to a church dance an hour and 30 minutes away. We went out to eat and then found a cookie place where we split a large ice cream sandwich. We've actually been doing a lot of driving lately. Alex and I got asked to be in charge of training the Mas and Pas for our upcoming 5-Stake Youth Pioneer Trek, so we had to drive to 5 different areas to do trek presentations. We'll do 3 training sessions later in April and May when the Mas and Pas have been selected. The presentations were essentially recruitment talks.
We got our March temple visit in - still raining.
Savannah had a play date with friends. She hurt her hand while playing on a Ninja jungle gym structure. We actually had it x-rayed later in the week because she couldn't bend her finger. It wasn't broken, but some of the cartilage was swollen and sore.
We put together a puzzle, inspired by a talk at church that compared indexing to a puzzle piece of temple and family history work.
Savannah had a couple friends over to our house - it was raining, but they still wanted to jump on the trampoline. Fun, but they were soaked!
We did our festive St. Patrick's Day meal with green Alfredo sauce on noodles, green rolls, peas, broccoli, key lime pie, and sugar cookies. The boys left right after dinner to go camping on the beach with some of the young men. Savannah went with me to a young women night put on by one of the other young woman leaders. The girls painted rocks, had festive snacks, and played some games such as shaking ping pong balls out of a box strapped to them.
Jared and the priests group put on a youth activity which turned out to be a lot of fun. Groups had previously prepared and submitted short videos of different movie genres of their choosing. Some of them were pretty good and others were interesting... everyone had fun making their videos. Our boys are pretty talented with the video editing and background music and things. Jared's group made a "Jailbreak" video, which won best video. Owen and Weston did a "Dog's Way Home" video starring Kai. The video starts off showing Weston and Kai doing their normal activities - going for a run, watching the news, and playing. Then Kai gets dog-napped, but she escapes and finds her way home. It's pretty cute. It was hilarious trying to get Kai to do what we wanted though. She doesn't like leaving anyone behind, so it was hard to get the video of her walking by herself (having to leave Weston behind and walking towards Owen with the camera). She also wouldn't get up on the "wall" that she jumps off of to escape. I thought she was going to bite Owen as he tried to pick her up and put her on the storage bench.
The activity was a success, with popcorn, brownies, and short videos. Judges selected the best videos, although each group got a "top banana award". One of the young men leaders handed out the awards and did great on the spot about defining each award given.
Owen got to participate in a Musical Theatre Competition of America (MTCA) for 2 days in Anaheim. He got up at 3:00am to get ready to go. We left at 3:50am to arrive at the school by 4:00am... except the gate was still closed... we backed out and waited for 30 minutes. The actual time to arrive was 4:30am. Anyway, they got on a bus and headed there. Their first event of the day was at 8:30am. They had a full day of singing, dancing, auditions, and hanging out at the mall. He had to sing some solo lines to audition for a song and also perform a dance number. He wasn't excited about the (required) auditions which were late that night when he was exhausted. He also didn't like the song (that everyone had to sing for the audition). He didn't go to bed until midnight, so it was a long day! The next day started at 6:00am with more competitions and classes. He learned how to do some stage make-up (the wounded arm). After the singing and competitions were over, they had some free time in the evening hanging around a fancy hotel. Several kids went to a dance, but Owen was kind and hung out with a girl who had an injury and couldn't dance. (That's the girl he's with in the picture.) He had so much fun that it was hard to leave, but I drove to pick him up late Saturday night (easily the most dangerous thing of the week driving in the crazy LA traffic - I saw a tire that had just fallen off of a big truck in the lane beside me and cars swerving to miss it). I did make it there, and I went so he could be home for Sunday. He gave up going to Disneyland on Sunday so he could keep the Sabbath Day holy. He also missed the awards ceremony on Sunday, but he found out they won 1st place in one category and 2nd in another. There were groups there from other states, such as UT, TX, OH, and FL, so it was a big accomplishment. He really had a great time and enjoyed hanging out with his friends. He was a good missionary and example to those classmates. He had to explain to all of them why he wouldn't be there on Sunday. Then he also shared his testimony in church on Sunday morning about his decision to keep the Sabbath Day holy, so he was a shining example to his peers at church too.
Here's a few videos from the song they won 1st place for (the videos aren't great quality - just a recording from one of the parent chaperones). Good luck finding Owen - he's often in the back.
Alex missed out on the fun driving to LA... because he was on a work trip to Scotland. He would live there if he could.
The kids had Spring Break this past week. When Dad is gone, that means Spring Break isn't very exciting because the rest of us just stayed home. I really needed a break from driving to various activities and from our busy schedule, so we didn't do much at all. The "fun things" for the week were getting Blenders smoothies, getting hamburgers at The Habit, one day of shoe and toy shopping (not fun for me...), and making homemade pizzas. Savannah had two friends over one day, which partially fulfilled her need for social interaction. We did some spring cleaning too and the normal grocery shopping (but obviously that's not part of the "fun things").
Why do these kids always have to eat?! 😀 They are better at helping with the chores these days.
We had some other sports this month, but I'll save those for a later post.
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