Spring break

My children are on spring break this week.  Some think it's early, but considering we live in a college town, it's not surprising.  Today is one of those days that I want to document.  It was an amazing day.  A day where my children and I had fun together with very little fighting or whining.  What little did occur was toward the end of the day when everyone was tired and starting to get cranky, so I'm not going to count it.

I felt bad needing to wake up my children at 7am on a vacation day, but we needed to leave the house by 8:30 am to make their dentist appointment.  We drove to a larger town that has a wonderful dentist that caters to children.  I will have to say we have some great dentists in town who treat children, but they are not child-centered.   This office only treats children and has a very child-friendly, child-centered office.  My kids actually enjoy going to the dentist.

After their visit with the dentist (unfortunately three of the five will be visiting again next month to have one tooth each repaired), we then headed out for lunch.  "Where are we going for lunch?" was the question I heard.  Honestly, I had no idea.  Knowing that after lunch we were headed to the mall (something our small town doesn't have), I started driving in that direction.  "We'll just pick something along the way."

Then they spotted it... Steak n Shake.  A place they've only heard about on television commercials.  Of course we had to stop there!  We had a wonderful lunch with burgers, fries, chicken strips, grilled cheese, and shakes.  (Mom was good and had an unsweetened iced tea.)  Lunch was gobbled up and everyone agreed it was delicious.

Then it was time to visit the mall.  A place we only see about once per year, if they're lucky.  This mall had something the younger ones wanted and something the older ones wanted.  The funny part is, if you look at their purchases you will have a hard time knowing who wanted which store.  Build-A-Bear and Hot Topic were the two stores we had on our minds.  The children had money of their own to spend and did they ever.  The older four children each had previously received a stuffed animal from their Grandma.  Now it was the youngest one's turn.  Grandma had given her money for her birthday back in October to make her own friend.  Yes, it took us a while to get to a Build-A-Bear.  Remember that we live in the middle of nowhere and we have five kids with activities.  Sometimes things take a while.

Armed with birthday money from Grandma coupled with Christmas money from Granny & Papa, the youngest one went to town.  She picked out an adorable purple dog with a sparkly purple collar.  She had so much fun stuffing it, giving it a bath, dressing it up, and giving it a name (first name is Twinkles).  She also enjoyed watching her sisters shop in the store as well!  The oldest got a white owl which was named Hedwig (we're Harry Potter fans, if you can't tell).  Hedwig will be joining eldest at college in the fall.  My second one decided to get an outfit for the bear Grandma had previously purchased.  The middle one picked out a bunny with floppy ears which she named Sir Hops-A-Lot.  He received a pair of jeans and a hoodie.  The forth one picked out the green 4-leaf clover teddy bear (named Abby) with a St. Patty's day themed dress.  They were having so much fun that I almost bought my own stuffed animal (though I didn't).

After all the new friends were adopted and paid for, we ventured over to Hot Topic.  We had a variety of items purchased there: a silly finger puppet, gloves, suspenders, rabbit earmuffs, a button that says "free hugs", and a couple hats.  We also took a quick trip over to JC Penny's where #2 found a hoodie she really wanted.

After the mall, we headed over to Borders (bookstore).  Surprisingly only four books were purchased.  We had a lot of fun looking around though.  When we were done there, we headed home.  When we were almost home, it was dinner time so we stopped at Dairy Queen to eat.  Yes, it was a full-service store, too, so we had actual food and very little ice cream.  At that point we were all tired and starting to get a little cranky.  We were soon home and spent the evening relaxing.  Hubby had something else going on for work, so it was nice that our plans could be flexible today.  Not something I'd like to do every day, but it was a nice treat.

Tomorrow our plans are to clean house.  If I can get half of what I'd like to get done accomplished tomorrow, I would be content letting them have the rest of the week off as long as they don't mess up what we clean.  We'll see if that actually happens!  (Prayers welcome!)

Edited to add:  I realized after I posted this that it is around 1:30 am on Wednesday.  The day I'm talking about is actually Tuesday.  I guess I should try to get my mind to turn off so I can actually get to bed so we can do that cleaning tomorrow... umm, today.