Spring Break

Sigh.

Oh, Spring Break, how I miss thee!  It's taken me a couple of weeks to post these, and now we are in the thick of track season.  Nate coaches, which means 10-11 hour days away on practice days and 11-13 hours away on meet days.  Today, he left at 6:45am, came home for an hour at 5:30pm, then went back for a training.  

But, alas, I digress.  Fabulous, restful, carefree, beautiful SPRING BREAK!

Our first weekend was Easter, which I, unfortunately, did not get any pictures of.  We spent the day with the Kellar's and it was fabulous.  For some appropriately spiritual thoughts, see my last post <here>.

For now, we'll move on to the deeply meaningful truth that Levi had a mullet.   On Easter Sunday afternoon, in Grandpa and Grandma K's backyard, we decided to take care of it.

Business up front.

Party in the back.

Teamwork!

Don't you just wanna kiss him?

Somehow, I failed to get a final picture, but Mike and Nate did an amazing job.  No clippers, even.


Later in the week, we took a day trip to Cannon Beach!

We wanted to:
A) try out a road trip in our new Honda Odyssey (yes! we now have a minivan! love it!),
B) Let Levi experience the sand and the waves for the first time, and
C) have something other than yard work to show for our week off.

Ecola State Park viewpoint

Hike from the top viewpoint down to Indian Beach

Levi LOVED everything about the beach:

Logs, sand, water, rocks, you name it.

I realize I don't have to include all of these pictures,

but I can't part with any of them.  What personality

this little one has!

A 14-month's old perspective of the beach.  Levi's

quote of the day was "Whoa!" which he said over and over

on our hike and near the water.

I agree, buddy!

While I chased Levi and kept him from eating too much sand, the older boys played in the tide pools.  Jeans, sweatshirts and all!  They had SO much fun!

The rest of the week was spent mostly at home.  We were supposed to do an Easter dinner with my family on Monday, but Gabriel had to go and get croup, so we had to postpone that.

Nate started reading the boys The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Totally recommend it!  Ben was SO into the story.  He understood the connection between Aslan and Jesus right away.  He begged and begged Nate to keep reading each night.  He cheered and jumped up and down when Aslan came back to life.  Sam got into it too, but got a little caught up with Mr. Tumnus.  He was very concerned about him and asked about him every chapter.  Didn't exactly get the big picture yet.  On a side note, if you have kiddos that care a little too much for the bad guys in stories, like ours do, then this is the perfect story to teach them to cheer for the Good side.  

Reading C.S. Lewis with Daddy and scarfing kale chips from the garden.

Doesn't get much better for my boys (or me)!

Sammy's a big fan

On the right, you can see Nate's handiwork.  We have almost all of our wood for next winter already, thanks to all of his hard work!

On the left, you can see the garden work we've been doing: expanding the bed on the bottom, tearing up the grass in between the beds, and now we've laid cedar chips.  It looks great!

Overall, it was a wonderful week together.  We felt rejuvenated and ready to tackle a very busy Spring!