Ross took off work on the Monday of spring break and we went bowling! I took the girls bowling maybe three years ago so it was fun to go now. They both enjoyed it and did pretty good, too. I had to help Molly and her bowling wasn't the traditional bowling you think of, but rather just kind of tossing the ball down the lane! She had a blast, though.
After bowling we got a treat at Andy's! It was a fun day!
The girls were on spring break from March 11-18 and we had a fun time together! We didn't go on a big vacation, but just did fun things around Springfield. On Saturday I took the girls shopping at Hobby Lobby. Molly had seen some mini shopping carts there that she desperately wanted/needed for her Barbie dolls and Lucy had seen a scrapbook there that she desperately wanted/needed to make a scrapbook with. So I decided to treat them and let each get what they wanted. Molly loved her shopping carts and they fit right in with all her Barbie stuff. Lucy got right to work on her scrapbook and did a great job getting it put together.
That night we ate dinner at Freddy's and went to the new HyVee in town. We like to go to "our HyVee" which is just about one mile away from our house and have been excited to go to the new HyVee. It's not in a super convenient location to where we are, but we had heard it was really nice, so decided to make that a spring break outing!
The new HyVee did not disappoint! It was really nice and clean and even had a mini clothing store and shoe store in it, along with some exercise equipment! It has a Wallburgers restaurant and a mini food court, too. We let the girls get a treat and had fun waving at the check-out camera!
Sunday of spring break was a really nice day, about 65 and sunny so it was fun to play outside!
A few weeks ago the PTA sponsored a Penny War at school that turned out to be a lot of fun and very successful! It was basically a fundraiser where we had a jar set up for each class at school. (Our school has grades K-5 and has 20 different classes with 3 classes per grade level and 2 SPED classes.) We had a picture of each teacher on a jar and students could bring in money to put in their teacher's jar or another teacher's jar. Pennies and bills counted as positive and all silver coins to be counted as negative towards that teacher's total for the week. All the money we collected during the week was to be put towards the school book room. The school book room is used by all teachers in the school for their reading groups, etc.
The first day we collected about $40 total form all the jars and this amount increased each day. We announced the winners each day and the classes who were winning one day often ended up in the negative the next day as people learned the penny war game of sabotage!
Overall this fundraiser was a huge success! We ended up making $2,600, and took in $1,500 alone on the last day! We were all super surprised with this success! The top three classes received a popcorn party and because it went over so well we decided to reward the entire school with a popsicle party and give each student a pop-it as a thank you and a reward. We also got a trophy and a certificate for the top three classes and a fun stuffed unicorn as a "prize" for the teacher who was the most sabotaged! That teacher was sabotaged by $191, meaning she had $191 worth of silver coins put in her jar over the course of the week.
A few PTA members and I got the fun job of counting all the coins each day and boy, was that ever a time-consuming job! At the end of the week we realized we could have just taken everything to the bank and they could have counted the coins for us using a coin counter and still kept everything separated by class for us. We are definitely doing that all week the next time we do a penny war!
We, well Ross, updated the girls bathroom over the last few weeks. We had been planning on doing this for a while and decided to start on it this year. To update it, Ross painted the oak cabinets white, painted the walls from yellow to a blueish/green color, and we had a new countertop installed along with new sinks, faucets, hardware, and towel bars. It looks really nice and Ross did a great job putting everything together. It was a lot of work, but he made it look good! The countertop is quartz and so much nicer than the old one we had. The girls really like it!
We also bought a new shower curtain and still need to find a few pictures or decorations for the wall.
We went to Fantastic Caverns over spring break and while we were waiting to go on our tour we looked around at their gift shop. I noticed they had several of these collector spoons for sale. I remembered that my mom has several of these types of spoons that she used to display at her house. They were spoons she had bought as souvenirs from different vacation spots. It was funny to me that this is something still produced and sold! I would think spoon collecting would be a thing of the past!
And then shortly after our trip to Fantastic Caverns, I was at my Gramma Ward's house and noticed she had a spoon rack on display in her house! She's had this up for quite a long time, but I think I noticed it more now since I had just seen the spoons at Fantastic Caverns. I wonder if anyone still collects spoons today!?
We had spring picture day a few weeks ago and I took these pictures of the girls before we left for school that morning. The difference in the two made me laugh! One is completely happy and excited to take a picture, the other not so much! But, on any given day, the frowns could very easily be flip-flopped. Today Lucy was the frowny one because I would not let her put makeup on for her school pictures. Such a mean mom I am! But frowns or smiles, they are both so pretty and I do love them so!
I saw this picture on Facebook and think it's so neat! It's cool how illusions like this work!
Lucy got Molly a helium-filled balloon for her birthday. The balloon came with a long string tied to it, but there was no weight tied to the string to keep it from floating up into the ceiling. We explained to Molly that if she let it go in certain parts of our house it would float up and be hard to get.
She got the balloon around 2pm on Saturday afternoon and did a great job with it until about 10am on Monday morning. She made it almost 48 hours without losing the balloon! That Monday was President's Day, so Ross was off work and the girls were home from school. I went to my 9am class at the gym that morning and as I pulled in our driveway and opened up the garage door I saw Ross walking out to get the ladder to bring inside. I started laughing and immediately knew why he was getting the ladder....the balloon had been let go of in our two-story, open entryway!
It wasn't a big deal to get the balloon down, but it was just funny to me! However, I did tie a weight to the string to keep it from happening again!
