I "Cereal-ously" Love you!

We just had a wonderful Valentine's day. I got to go to both Tucker's and Benson's class parties. 
I love getting to be in their classrooms and see how they interact in their element. It's so fun.

I went to Benson's first. They were making a cute heart pizza craft and drinking their hot chocolate. They also exchanged their little valentines. 

Benson really loved his fox valentine's day box. 

 

Then I went down a different hall and went to Tucker's class party. He worked hard making his v-day box and he loved it. He's really into minecraft right now. 

He also made a little gnome craft and they exchanged valentines. 

It's always fun to watch them sort through their valentines and show them to each other.

My boys passed out snack size pringles again. That's always a hit and they are super easy. 

When the kids got home we had a little valentine's day party. 
I kind of love this theme. "I Cereal-ously Love you" and I served these cute heart-shaped fruit loops and cute cereal bowl shaped pancakes. 
We ate our little treats and watched a movie together while we waited for Dad to get home. 

How cute are the cereal bowl pancakes? I love them!

 

That night we had a nice dinner at home with Dad and some quality time together. 

Oh and a few days later I hosted a little party for a girl's night. It was a favorite things party and it was so fun.  There were somewhere around 15 girls. Everyone brought 5 of the same favorite thing and then we drew names to see who got what. Everyone went home with 5 new things and it was awesome. 

We chatted, ate and laughed and everyone was asking when we could do it again. 

I feel so lucky to have such a great village here. There are so many amazing women here and I love getting to cultivate friendships. 

Branson Family Getaway

We just got home from a super fun weekend in Branson, MO. In December we bought in at Bluegreen Vacations and we had to return to do an owner's review this month. So they paid for us to come back and stay at a hotel for two nights and so we all came! The kids got their own room and they loved it. 

When we first arrived in Branson, we stopped for dinner at this cute little 50's diner. 
The kids all loved the food and we got ice cream after finishing our burgers. 
Then we checked into our hotel. 

Sadly, our owner's review was at 8 am the next morning so we had to wake up early. 
We were able to leave our kids at the hotel and go to the review alone. 
It's so nice to have kids that are old enough to trust to be left alone. Plus they had their tablets so they were pretty happy. 

The review took longer than we planned because we ended up buying more points and that purchase process takes a while, but we eventually finished and headed back to our kiddos. 

Then the real fun began. We got changed into our swimsuits, packed up and checked out. Then we drove over to "Splash Country" to play for the rest of the day. 

I used to work at Splash Country so I was excited to take my kids back again, but this time they had just finished a big remodel. They more than doubled the size of the park and added a huge wave pool and three more big tube slides. 
We had so much fun!

Benson didn't want to ride the tube slides alone, so I got to ride with him and it was awesome. 

The kids also loved the treehouse play area. 

I think Tanner's favorite things were the hot tubs and the tube slides. 

We all took our turn warming up in the hot tubs.

But everyone loved the wave pool. Sadly Benson couldn't be in the wave pool on his own, so either Chris or I had to get in the deep end with him, but it was so fun to watch his smiles that it was worth being in the cold water. 

I'm not typically one for tube slides but these were pretty fun. The blue, yellow and green slides were racing slides and it tracked your time. So we had lots of fun racing. 

We were all pretty exhausted after about 5 hours at the park. So then we got dressed and left to get dinner.  The kids were dying to go to Olive Garden, so we took them there and they loved it. 

We had such a great weekend together in Branson and we are excited to have our Bluegreen option to visit more often. 

Crazy Winter Ice Storm

We just had the craziest ice storm roll through. It's been too cold this winter and very little snow, but then we had a ton of sleet/ice fall and it coated the ground and the roads. 

It's so cold that the ice can't melt so that means, no school. We had two virtual school days and one real snow day. Most of the days were too cold to be outside but finally it warmed up enough for us to go outside and play. The kids had a great time. 
We tried using our boogie boards, pool tubes and Tanner even brought out his skim board. 

We also brought out our sled and it worked the best. But the kids loved all the different ways of sledding. We have the best driveway for sledding. 

I'm pretty ready for the kids to go back to school at this point, but it was really fun to play outside together for a couple hours. 

Now that we've had our winter weather and a few snow days, I'm officially ready for spring. 

Bring on the warmer weather!