Category: Field Trips (Page 8 of 10)

I don’t know who’s happier that school is out for the year–the kids or the parents. Seriously. I’m so relieved that the homework nagging, the assignment finding, the driving the carpools, the band programs, field day, class parties, dance festival, yada–yada–yada are OVER, that I’m ok with the fact that my kids will be hanging around home for the next 2 1/2 months.

But before we move on to summer and the festivities, let’s review some of the fun things we did with the end of the year, shall we?

The kindergarteners did SO WELL on their dance festival dances. I love this picture! Notice how none of the kids are exactly on the same steps at the same time? That’s John in the bright orange jacket.

This was one of my favorite games at John’s field day. The kids had to put on a wig and a shirt, or a girl’s wig and a boa, and kick the soccer ball through the cones, then make a basket at the other end. This is John in the “boy’s” gettup. How cute is that?

Here’s my group on the school sign.

On the day of the dance festival, here’s John and his partner Whitney in costume.

I tried to get pictures of the other girls doing their dances, but since I was sitting with the Kindergarteners (passing out flags, helping them get into their lines, passing out water), I didn’t get any good pictures of them. But Natalie’s somewhere in this group.

here they are after the big festival.

And while we were doing these fun activities, Ryan was here:

in a sea of Japanese. He was in Japan less than a week, which seems like not enough time to even get acclimated, but it was a successful trip.

We’ve gotten a good start on summer, too.
Friday I took the kids swimming after they got out of school. Of course as soon as we got there, it turned cold and overcast and we were FREEZING by the time we got to the car. But it still counts! Friday night the kids got to laze around and watch a movie from Redbox, which is one of our favorite cheap source of entertainment.
Saturday, I decided to ditch the garage sale I was planning and just hauled a truck load of stuff to DI. That left us free to let the kids play with friends, and we went out to our favorite Mexican spot, Los Hermanos. Yum.

It’s spring break in these parts, and we’ve embarked on a trip to sunnier parts. Namely, Arizona. Our first night we stayed in Page, near Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam. There were no more spots available for tours when we were there in the afternoon, so we decided to reserve spots on the first tour the next morning. Which happened to be Megan’s 14th Birthday!

So, bright and early at 8:15, we were there for our dam tour. I had the kids say “Dam tour” as much as possible while we were there, because it cracked me up. I know, I’m evil. We had an interesting tour of the dam, and were awed by the engineering of it all. Those turbines are enormous. Did you know that 25% of the Nation’s food is grown from water from the Colorado river? Wow. The kids enjoyed earning their junior ranger badges,– which is much easier to earn than the Jr. Ranger badge at Yellowstone, by the way– and enjoyed the tour. We went down, down, down in the elevator (the second longest elevator ride in the country), and then saw the interesting innards of the power generating facility. Wow! At the end of the tour, while we were in the echo-y tunnel, the nice tour guide said, “This is the birthday part of the tour, where we will all sing Happy Birthday to MEGAN.” So we all sang to Megan in the echo tunnel at the dam. I tell you, it’s the best DAM birthday ever!

After the dam tour, we made our way to the Grand Canyon for the day. We went to the old watch tower (where John promptly fell down and hurt his elbow, launching his first tantrum of the day), then later worked on the junior ranger badges for the Grand Canyon. We went for walks, looked for animals (big fat squirrels and even a HUGE elk!), took lots and lots of pictures, and generally enjoyed the day. Except that it was cold. It’s April, and it’s Arizona, but I guess at 7000 feet it’s not that warm in the spring. After our Ranger led presentation on geology and the history of the grand canyon, we’d had about enough for the day. The wind was strong, and our patience was getting short. We decided we had had about enough of Nature for the day, so we headed to Flagstaff to our hotel.

When I was booking hotels, I waited until the last minute, and it took me a while to figure out WHERE to stay. If you put in “Grand Canyon” you get varied locations anywhere from Page, to Tuba to Flagstaff. I decided to do Page the first night and then Flagstaff the second night, since we are making our way South. Our hotel in Flagstaff would not qualify as a winner. Since it seemed quite Bates Motel-ish, I was a little worried for our lives. I reserved this off brand hotel because I could get three double beds and didn’t have to pay for a suite to get them. Then I wouldn’t be having three kids sleeping on the floor like we sometimes do. (We’ve been spoiled by traveling with my parents recently. They always will put two kids in their room so then I don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to house us all.) But the room was spacious enough, even if it was very old. But the kicker came when I turned on the “heat” trying to warm up the room. The little heat/ac unit in the corner just blew COLD air. No hot air could be found. It was FREEZING! The windows were old and didn’t close all the way, either. I called the front desk and told them it was really cold in our room and could I please get three extra blankets, and she said (in her Indian accent), “You come lobby?” Sure. I’ll venture out in the cold and get the blankets.

We did survive our cold night, and were none to happy about getting out of bed in the morning, I’ll tell you. Luckily we had places to go and didn’t need to hang out in the motel for very long. I took a quick shower, thankful that I always pack shampoo, since there was none here, and dried as quickly as possible.

“Breakfast” consisted of bread, a toaster, and some mini hostess donuts. Seriously. Next time I’ll read more of the reviews, and perhaps look harder when I’m searching for a hotel.

But for Megan, it will surely be a birthday to be remembered! I’ll get some pictures up later–stay tuned!

On every vacation, there are just a few things that stand out. Little things that keep me laughing long after the vacation is over.

While at Lego Land, we were watching John and Jenna and Natalie drive their cute little lego cars around the driving school. Those cars don’t reverse, so if the kids get in a jam or hit each other, they are instructed to raise their hand and wait for someone to come and help them. Right in front of us, two little kids collided in their cars. The little guy couldn’t figure out how to back up and get going again, and he started to cry a little bit. His dad, a man from India with a nice Indian accent, was standing right by me, giving his son all kinds of instructions. But he was also getting frustrated when he yelled, “Raise your hand! Raise your hand! Stop crying!” It cracked me up so much, I had to walk away and tell Ryan.

Ryan has an unhealthy obsession with the churro. Once he smells a churro, I don’t think he can stop himself from buying one. Or two. Or sometimes three. He tells us they are for us “to share”, but I know he wants them all for himself. On this trip, he made it through the whole day at LegoLand without buying a churro. He talked about it, and he got close, but he resisted the urge. You really can get a churro anytime you want at the local Costco for $1, and at the park they are something like $3.50, so you KNOW where I stand on the subject. What did him in was when a French man walked by saying something about getting a (insert heavy French accent here) Schurrrrrro. Ryan gave in and bought 3 Churrrrros, since they were “on sale”. 3 for $7 or something like that.

In my observation, you can tell when it’s about 4:00 at an amusement park because that’s when the little people start to melt down. As I was making my way around, I overheard, “Daddy, let’s just go HOME!” That makes me laugh, since aren’t we all there trying to make our kids happy? I heard several children melting down around that time, and also witnessed more than one parent also melting down. Food, people. The secret is to keep feeding them the WHOLE day so they won’t melt down so badly when you are trying to squeeze in the last few rides of the day.

Later in the week, at Sea World, I was sitting waiting with John outside the Atlantis ride. John did not want to go on it, and everyone else did, so I was ok to sit out and wait. I had ridden it twice the other day, anyway. As I was sitting on a bench waiting, I realized that the couple sitting right next to me was speaking German. Ryan is really good about seeking out the Portuguese speakers from Brasil so that he can talk to them, thus practicing his second language. I’m not so good about it. Even when I hear someone speaking German, it’s usually just as they are walking by and I don’t want to jump right in. But they were sitting right next to me, and they were obviously waiting for someone, too. So, I manned up and said, “Sind Sie von Duetschland?” They instantly payed attention, turned to me surprised, and we started talking. My German is “nicht so gut” anymore, and I was rusty, but they were very sweet and told me I spoke “such good German”. I even told them that I had been a missionary for the Kirche Jesu Christi der Heiligen der letzten Tage when they asked what I had been doing in Germany. “Oh, Mormonen?” they said. I enjoyed talking with them for 5-10 minutes until my brother and the rest of the family came. I was proud of myself that I hadn’t just been chicken and sat there silent.

We had some ticket trouble on this trip. Since we had four comp tickets with the prize that I won, that meant we had to buy three more tickets for us, and then two ticket for my mom and dad for both Sea World and Lego land. We bought the tickets through Scott’s employee discount something. The Legoland tickets were mailed to us, but my mom printed the SeaWorld tickets from her email. When we got to the ticket booth of SeaWorld, the printed tickets didn’t work and we had to spend 20 minutes or so waiting at the guest services window to get things sorted out. They were also running a promotion that if you buy a one day ticket, you get to come back another day free. But it didn’t work for the comp tickets because we didn’t “buy” them. So they gave us second day tickets for all but those four. Funny thing, but we had a lot of volunteers to stay home from the second day of SeaWorld. Ryan had a presentation to work on, and he hadn’t done hardly any work on it. My parents offered to let us use their tickets, and they would go to Old Towne or do other things instead of going, and I was certainly willing to stay home, but that would leave Scott and Lori-Kay with ALL nine kids, so that wouldn’t be quite fair, would it? So, we took my parent’s tickets, and when scanned, they said “welcome back Eugene” on the screen when Megan scanned the ticket. But no one cared. Somehow John’s ticket hadn’t been scanned or something, so he was able to use that ticket again and we all got in fine.

At LegoLand we had similar issues about our tickets. They are also running a promo that you can buy one ticket and come back another day. It says right on the ticket that the second day must be used within 90 days of the first. So, after our first day, we checked at guest services to see what we had to do to use these tickets for another day. The guy gave my dad his two tickets, but then when looking at my tickets, told me that three of these tickets weren’t valid for the extra day ticket (why three and not four, I don’t know), but he would give me comp tickets for the Sea Adventure or something like that. But we could still come back within 90 days on the ones we had paid for. What? It all worked out, somehow. Even though that guy at the guest services did his best to confuse me.

In order to save money, we didn’t buy lunch at any of the parks. What with a single hamburger costing about $8, feeding a family of 7 can really KILL any kind of budget. So, we made our own breakfast when the hotel didn’t have free breakfast. We brought lots of snacks and lunch type things, and stopped at a grocery store halfway through the week to replenish, but by Friday we were down to the last few pitiful snacks. I made sandwiches out of the last of our bread, but we had the choice of cheese (just cheese–no ham. But we did still have mayo and lettuce) or peanut butter (no jam or jelly). I packed up some sandwiches, threw in the last of our granola bars and apples and capri sun, and off we went. Unfortunately, I just put everything in one bag and stuck it under the stroller instead of divvying it all out in their individual fanny packs. When we went through security, they said, “You can’t take those sandwiches into the park.” What the what? “You’re actually not supposed to take food in at all,” she said. I felt like saying, “If you knew the caliber of these sandwiches, you wouldn’t even care,” but I didn’t. I offered to throw out the sandwiches, and she said, “oh, I’ll let you take them this time.” like I was some kind of sandwich toting criminal.

We did luck out on a couple of dinners, though. Monday night, we chose to eat at TGIFridays, and a sign on the door said that kids eat free with a paying adult. Since we had my parents there, that made 5 adult meals, and four kids’ meals. ALL the kids meals were FREE! I jokes with my parents that now the truth was out about why we invite them along–to drive our kids in their car and to help us pay less for dinner. Those are definitely perks. The restaurant right next to our hotel also had a “kids eat free” special, and then in St. George we were eating at the Denny’s, and our bill came to something like $30. What? Kids eat free on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and it was Saturday! Score!

Wow-sorry this post got so long. If you made it through to the end, I commend you. And I promise, next post will NOT be about our vacation.