A Weekend to Remember - Spring comes & Goes!

A Weekend to Remember - Spring comes & goes - are you ready to join us for the adventure?
Well, the last time I posted, nearly a month ago, we were celebrating 40 degree weather and the early signs of spring. We knew it wouldn't last but it was very exciting. Now it is a month later and we have experienced a wide array of weather - reminders that old man winter hasn't left the state of Wisconsin! It is, afterall, now MARCH in Wisconsin -and if you live around here, you know EXACTLY what I mean!

So - our adventure begins on Friday - we had 34 homeschooled teens to our home for a Game Night. IT was great fun. The kids are always kind and respectful and they just know how to hang out and have fun together. We played games and ate and played more games.

This is the beginning of a Pit Game - very loud - lots of yelling and laughing. Even the spectators get a good laugh. This was followed up by a rousting game of Spoons - starting with about 15 players.

Even the little kids get in on the action. Several teens took time to play some kid games with our three youngest. Isn't that sweet?

Now, what is NOT pictured here is the AFTER PARTY that took place from 10pm to midnight when the game night was over. Courtney had invited a college friend and some other homeschoolers over and they hung here and chatted. Her college friend spent the night and we eventually got to bed.

Saturday brought some new adventures...Courtney spent the day with friends and the rest of us went to the Awana Games -where 5 teams competed against each other. ON our way we experienced a disappointment - we stopped at Home Depot to participate in the Free Kid's Workshop (making small wooden race tracks and cars) but they had just run out :( boohoo!

Above the three kids are ready to play - they have their yellow neck ties on and knee pads for the first game which involved crawling! Below you see some fast moving kids doing the Train game - good thing they hung on! The Awana Games lasted about 2 1/2 hours.

Now, while we were at the Awana Games, Courtney is spending time with friends. She is pictured here with two of her best friends. A group of about 8-10 kids ventured off into a park/rec area and went exploring. It was a beautiful day as can see here - they don't have their winter coats on!

Now...if you are thinking what I was thinking when I saw these pictures - you want to know exactly how deep this water is, right? We have NO idea. Courtney said she didn't really know either but there were times when she could see the bottom - TIMES! The teens all had a great time traversing the water but only two were "brave" enough to cross this particular part - which included tree hugging (another photo).

We were up way too late catching up with each other once we all got back home! Sleep deprivation is setting in...

Sunday...this isn't just a cute picture of Mom and Caleb - we are sitting at the Beja Shrine Circus, waiting for it to get started. We were gifted tickets at Christmas time for this event and we had a great time as a family. None of the kids had ever really seen a great circus. It was almost three hours long.

I wanted to put the picture of the kids with their favorite clown but it's stuck in someone else's camera card and I wasn't going to wait for it. Here - we are waiting for the circus. We sat in the 7th row right near the middle. Really nice seats. Now...something else you should know... as the circus was getting started, a snow storm was moving in. We were told it would be a heavy snowstorm bringing snow in quickly. We had to walk several blocks to our car so we bundled everyone up as tight as we could and braced ourselves for the onslaught of snow we were about to face. We were walking through many inches of snow all the way to the car and the car was half covered in ice. We were all laughing by the time we got into the car -well, maybe the youngest three didn't think it as funny as all the older ones did!

I put this picture in for perspective...there was so much snow on the ground of this three lane highway that there were no clear lanes - can you tell? IT was nuts!!!!

We get home and there are already FIVE inches of snow on our driveway!!!! We barely made it up the road to our house but couldn't pull in the driveway so we parked on the court and walked to the house.

Dan thought ahead to throw a snow shovel in the van so he shoveled a path for everyone to walk on.

Then there was the snow shoveling - Dan and Courtney took this on mostly by themselves, with a little bit of help from Mom after she got dinner in the oven. This is a picture of Courtney attempting to push the "U - PER Scooper" full of snow(they make these in the Upper UP of Michigan). Dan hadn't taught her the trick of leveraging it so it would ride up the snow drift and over the top so she came to a sudden stop. You should see Dan "operate" one of these things. With no snow blower, this is the next best thing - for Dan anyway.

This isn't really the picture I wanted, I grabbed the wrong one but so I don't lose the post, I'll leave it here and maybe I can post the video Courtney took! Dan couldn't make it up the driveway...he came in slidding sideways and couldn't straighten it out because it was icey underneath all that snow and it was still snowing. He slid down much of the driveway and stopped short of a snowbank - so we left it there. I'm sure the neighbors were talking about it!

The weekend is now over and I kicked all 4 of the kids out the door after lunch and told them to go play in the snow because it was likely to all melt by Tuesday when it hit 40 degrees again. They spent 4 hours outside and had a great time.

Dad helped them build this fort...then Bethany came out later and built a snow run for tube slides in the neighbors yard. A beautiful Wisconsin day....

As for sleep - we are at a deficit :)