Jayden's Birthday Weekend

Jayden opted this year to not have a birthday party with friends, he wanted to go to the Great Wolf Lodge.  However, I missed using a coupon and the GWL is gosh darn expensive if you don't have one.   So, we decided to try out a different place this time and we went to Coco Keys Waterpark.  It is pretty much just as fun as GWL waterpark and about half the price!  :)  We went up to the hotel Friday night and managed to get a sweet deal where they included 4 passes to the KC zoo for $10 more. 
Saturday morning, Jayden and Royal headed right off to the tube slides, while Willow and I went around the lazy river.  I should of counted how many times we went around the river, it was Willow's favorite place be and we spent probably 75% of our time there with her swimming and swimming and swimming for hours.  I went around enough times that I know it is an average of 150 steps around.  :)  I figure it was a good workout since I missed my running club that morning.

Going down the tube slides with Jayden.

Saturday night, we stayed the night in a different hotel and managed to get a sweet hookup.  When we checked in, they had us booked in a room with 1 king sized bed and the only way for us to get a room with 2 beds was to upgrade.  For $25 we upgraded to a secure floor (you feel so fancy when you have to put your keycard into the elevator to punch in your hotel floor), we had access to the club where there was a refrigerator full of bottled water and sodas that we could have as much as we wanted (just the bottled water was worth it since hotel water tastes awful!), there were free appetizers in the evening we could cash in on, and then we also got free breakfast in the morning.  It was awesome!  Royal hung out in the club that evening watching basketball, while the kids watched a movie on our tv.  He brought me a tea they had up there to make up for ditching me for a couple hours.  :)
Sunday morning, after breakfast, we packed up and used our zoo passes to kill a few hours before we had to pick up Royal's parents from the KC airport.
We got to the zoo just in time to watch their live bird show.  I thought Jayden was going to fall out of his chair when they brought out a Peregrine Falcon.  It is Jayden's all time favorite bird because it can fly/dive up to 200 mph.  Going to the zoo with Jayden is a lot of fun.  He can retain facts about animals like it's nobody's business, and he has multiple animal books at home that he has read and reread and not to mention all the Wild Kratts episodes, so there's no need to read the signs, he will tell you all you need to know!  At the end of the bird show you could bring a dollar up to the front and give it to a Blue Hyacinth Macaw and he would put it in a mailbox.

Then we took a ride over the zoo to see the animals from high up!

Jayden took most of the pictures at the zoo, included a whole bunch of Royal's rear-end.  He kept giggling while we were walking and once I downloaded all of his pictures, I had a pretty good idea why.  :)
Royal carried Willow A. Lot.  She was pretty tuckered out from all of our swimming the day before and let's face it, who the heck sleeps good when they are in a hotel???

Jayden asked me to stand in the woods, so he could take my picture.  Guess he wanted me to be in my natural habitat as well.  :)

Here are some of Jayden's favorite animals.

Little Swimming Fish

Both of the kids are still doing really great in swimming.  I forgot to post this last month, but both kids moved up a level.  Jayden went from level 4b to level 5, and Willow went from level 3 up to 4a.

The swim club has been going through some management changes and we have been trying to ride out the storm because with the director of the swim club leaving, so left some of my very favorite teachers that have been working with Jayden and Willow since the beginning.  And the teachers that they brought in to fill some of the gaps just were not good.  I try not to be too critical, because for goodness sakes my kids are young and it's not like I'm training up Olympic athletes, and if they are having fun, then I can be okay with that.  But I do have a problem when I'm paying you to teach my kids to swim and you sit on the side of the pool and gossip with a fellow teacher the entire lesson and not actually get in the water, and then have my son swim a 50 breaststroke and then tell him what he did wrong after he got back instead of stopping him in the middle and fixing it.  But this past session, both Jayden and Willow were in the same class because of teacher shortages, but their teacher was awesome!  She also happen to have her son shadowing her so he could start teaching swim lessons as well, so the last 2 weeks of the session, he took Jayden aside and started working on more advanced skills for him.  Both Jayden and Willow have talked more about swimming this past month than they have in a long time.  Good teachers make such a difference! 

Willow and Jayden both use snorkels for part of their lessons, I guess it helps with body positioning, but they look so darn funny in the things!

 Here is Willow working on her racing dives.

One of the last things they are trying to work with Jayden on is his 100 IM (25 butterfly, 25 backstroke, 25 breaststroke, 25 freestyle), and once he has that mastered, he can try out for the swim teams if he wants.

His teacher is actually the current state champion in butterfly, so Jayden is pretty sure he's going to be the one to teach him how to be fast enough to beat his Uncle Jordan in the pool at it.

Jayden Turns 7!

April 24th, 2013, the day we woke up on Jayden's birthday to snow!

Freaky Kansas weather!  Luckily the sun was already shining warm sun down, so the snow melted quite quickly.  We started off the morning with chocolate chip waffles and breakfast sausages per the birthday boy's request and then got to opening presents and using them as quickly as possible.  We put on warm coats and went outside to start shooting off stomp rockets that Jayden got from Uncle Gabe and Aunt Brynn.

Then we moved onto Kitchen Science Experiments where we erupted volcanoes and used a lemon to power a clock.
(check out Willow's face in the first one, she really thought the thing was gonna blow to the ceiling)

After a couple hours of building paper airplane and Jayden going into a lengthy, and by lengthy I mean a good 45minuts, of him talking non-stop and explaining and demonstrating to me the theory behind why certain paper airplane designs fly better than other ones, using words like air space, and wing span, and the force of air, and air suction, and gravity, and air speed over the tail, and motion in the wings,  I have a certain feeling he has been paying attention and picking up on some good buzz words during all those tours of NIAR's labs that he has gotten with Royal.  :)
Then we took a walk to the mailbox and Nana's present had arrived.
Hmmmmm, excited?

Hmmmm, preview of moody years to come?

He took his little ipod right down to the treadmill and got himself a little run in.  :)

And finally, finally, after all day of waiting, the present he has been begging for for months was finally charged.  The present it took me weeks to convince Royal he wouldn't kill himself on (Jayden better not prove me wrong!) and I managed to find a screaming deal on with free shipping!  I'm not sure what I was thinking, I should of unpacked it the night before and got the battery charged so it would be good to go first thing in the morning.  It was brutal waiting.  Brutal I tell you.  But I think he finally forgave me for my oversight when he finally got on it and went flying down the road.

And then he started getting a little crazy....

Happy Birthday, Jayden!  We love you sooooooo much!

Kid Quote :: 25

Jayden : I just love animals! I love to read about them and learn about them and just everything about animals! I think I would like to do that for work!

Me : So, like a zoologist? Or something like that?

Jayden : Yeah. Or a ninja. I'd like to be a ninja too.

Willow Sings :: J.O.Y. and B.I.B.L.E.

Here is a little snippet of Willow singing....or yelling...you decide!  :)  I love this girl.  :)

Willow's Happy Feet

Willow is playing soccer for Happy Feet this spring and today was her first practice/game.  She was really excited, especially when we went shopping for a new pair of shorts and shin guards and socks.  She loved the shopping, however, she was not that thrilled to actually have to have that many layers on her legs/feet.  Willow takes off all shoes and socks as quickly as possible, she lives for summer and flip flops and bare feet, so I'm not so sure soccer is going to be her sport just for the amount of clothing/gear you have to wear.  :)  But I wrestled them on her and told her she could take them off as fast as she could as soon as soccer was over and that seemed to make her feel better.  :)

So, we got to the field, got her checked in, and sent her happily running off to the field. 

Then they started warming up by running around the field and Willow didn't budge, she kept pretending to fix her socks and pull her ponytail tighter.

We were yelling, "Run, Willow!  Run!"  Until I figured out why she wasn't moving.  Willow is still very boy/man-wary, something I'm not really trying to discourage and am hoping it caries over into teen/adult years.  :) And the coach in charge is a male, so he was asking them to run and Willow was pretending that he didn't exist.  But as soon as the female coach asked her to run, Willow was all about it!

As long as Willow was standing by the female coach, she would do what the male coach was telling her and eventually she warmed up to him enough to give him high-fives.

 Then it was game time!

And Willow did awesome!  Even if she was trying to steal the ball from her own teammate!  :)

Easter 2013

Easter, Easter, Easter.....It's so loaded with memories, good and sad.  I woke up in the morning feeling pretty good, but as the day went on, I just felt sadder and sadder.  Sad that I spend Easter out here in the middle of nowhere, doing Easter egg hunts for my kids and it's just the two of them.  I did Easter egg hunts with ALL of my cousins, and there were a lot of us, and so much fun, and so many eggs that my dad would forget where he hid them all.  Holidays are so hard when you are so far away from the rest of your family.  But we did get invited to be a part of some fun things.  We spent the day before Easter at a friend's family's house where they have a tradition of deep frying turkeys and coloring Easter eggs and that was a lot of fun.  And we did get invited back out there for Easter day too, but we decided not to go.  I was already in a funk and probably would of spent the entire time crying in a chair while my kids did Easter egg hunts with other people's cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas.   Easter is just a big reminder of the family I've lost.  Even if I was in Washington and around my family, it still wouldn't be the same.  Who knows if we'd even be together, maybe I'd still be doing Easter dinner with just the 4 of us, and I'd still be sad that I had the potential to be surrounded by my family, yet I wasn't.  Willie died and I feel like my family exploded, and Easter is just a very vivid reminder of when it all started...

We went to church in the morning and Jayden got entered into a drawing down in his environment and he ended up winning a rip-stick!  Which I was actually quite pumped about because I've always wanted to learn how to ride one!   :)  Royal on the other hand kept trying to give it away because all he could envision were the injuries that were going to happen.  I think Royal's just a little timid after he tried riding Jayden's razor scooter and bit it hard!  So, when we got home from church, we spent a lot of time helping him learn how to ride the thing.

And we did an Easter egg hunt.  Jayden shook every egg looking for money.

It was so nice out, we spent most of the day outside and even had a Silly String fight.

And by the end of the day, Jayden could do this.

He's still working on how to get momentum while on it, but he can balance on it quite well!

I spent a lot of the day sitting or laying out in the warm sun and remembering how much fun we had back on Easter 2007 and how much I miss my family, but also trying to watch and participate and spend time with and enjoy my family that I have right in front of me.