A snapshot of our Spring Break trip

Someday life will slow down. Like when I'm 89 years old, I think. I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures of our Spring Break trip to Boston and New York which might get edited by the end of summer if I'm lucky. (Update - it took me until October to edit them!  I'm adding just a few pictures here, and the rest will go in a special vacation book).  While the memories are fresh, I thought I would jot down a few memories. 

The weather was not our friend on this trip  

Somehow we managed to be on the East Coast during a freak cold spell which included lots of bitter cold wind, rain, and even snow. We were really excited when the high temperatures finally climbed to the high 40s by the end of our trip! One day in Boston (Monday) it was 28 degrees, but with windchill it felt like 18 degrees. And we traipsed all over town in the whiteout snowstorm with a wicked Arctic wind. Brrrr.  I have to go back to Boston someday when it's actually Springtime so I can better appreciate all the historical sites without frostbitten toes.

Despite the weather, we had a great time!  

We still did a lot, saw a lot, and made the most of our time in both cities. In particular, I feel like we did just about everything I had hoped to do in New York. Sometime when I visit again with Dan or for a girl's trip, I would love to spend more time exploring a variety of restaurants and walking through historic neighborhoods, but considering this is a family trip, we managed to see all the main tourist attractions and to have fun together.  We also walked a lot. Our fitbits registered 6-9 miles per day. 

Subways are efficient, only occasionally confusing, yet very dirty and rat-infested. 

We did, however, ride the subways everywhere throughout New York, and we were pretty good at it. We were especially pros at riding home in the late evenings after we watched a Broadway shows each night.  We walked with the crowds right to the huge Times Square 42nd Street station, swiped our Metro cards, wound our way past amateur musicians performing for tips to the correct train, and rode uptown to our stop at 125th Street in Harlem.

The history and architecture in both cities were fascinating. 

I have about 500 pictures of buildings and cool historical places to prove it. 

Everyone in the family likes New York style pizza.  

This is an important fact, because our vacation was so much more fun because we didn't fight any food battles. To accomplish this feat, we did eat at the exact same (very good) pizza and pasta restaurant every single day.

We love Broadway plays. And we are the luckiest people in New York City.  

We saw 4 plays (Dan and Aubrey saw 5).  We paid very little because we got almost all our tickets as "rush tickets" the day of the play. We had great seats for all but School of Rock (when they said "partial view" they meant it!).  We also saw Tuck Everlasting (which is still in previews, and was just fantastic), Finding Neverland (magical), and Matilda (pretty good - not our favorite). 

 

 AND........ we won a drawing for two tickets to the hottest show in town, Hamilton.  We paid $10 each for 2 front row tickets! It was the most amazing luck ever. Thousands of people enter a daily "digital lottery" to try to win the right to buy tickets to the sold out show. Somehow we happened to be in town the one day they did an in-person lottery drawing, and we were one of the few names drawn. Dan and Aubrey said the show was really amazing in every way!
Lin Manuel-Miranda and the Mayor of NYC a few feet away from us - no big deal . . .

Aubrey's face after Dan's name was drawn!

Two tickets to Hamilton!!!!

Front row in the theater!

Our kids are great ages for traveling

It's a great thing to be past the stage of juggling sippy cups, naps, and toddler tantrums while traveling. We wondered how Joseph's 11 year old legs would hold up to all our walking, but he was an intrepid traveler and no one complained about the walking or touring. This made the experience so much more enjoyable!

Aubrey is 16!

We loved celebrating our newly 16 year old!

The Friday before her birthday Aubrey came home from school to a surprise party. I had invited over some of her friends, 3 guys and 3 girls, and prepared an "Olive Garden" dinner. I made pasta and salad and had Dan pick up breadsticks and two types of sauce from Olive Garden, which is Aubrey's all-time favorite restaurant.  Our local fabulous bakery (Chuck's Produce) made a deeeelicous German Chocolate cake for dessert.

The week of Aubrey's party we had painters in our house all day every day, working on the kitchen cabinets. The painter was still in the kitchen until half hour into the party! It was a true miracle that I got the house cleaned and decorated, food ready, and party organized with all the chaos that comes with a home renovation. Not to mention that everything from my kitchen cabinets was stored in my dining room. It was pretty hilarious to be scrambling through boxes, looking for cake servers, birthday candles, pasta and salad serving bowls, etc.  But, it all worked out!

The teenagers watched the video we had made for Aubrey when she turned 8 and was baptized, and then ate dinner.  During dinner I had a slideshow playing with pictures from all of Aubrey's life, not just up to age 8!  

After dinner they watched a few Studio C episodes and then headed up to the bonus room where I had arranged a table of yummy goodies (forgot to take a picture!). They played games until parents came to pick them up.  One of the boys actually came to the party on his OWN birthday. He put off his family birthday celebration so he could be at Aubrey's party.  (Update: this happens to be the same guy who just asked Aubrey to LDS Prom.  Hee hee.)

The next day Aubrey took her final driving test at her driver's ed place. She passed, and didn't even have to parallel park!

Then, the next Wednesday was Aubrey's actual birthday. She had put in her requests for her breakfast in bed, but went to Seminary first and then climbed back into bed to receive her crepes and strawberries. Her Seminary teacher (who adores her) had brought her a "coffee" cake to class that day, so she was already pretty full!

We pulled out the scrapbooks from when Aubrey was born and relived that happy moment. We checked to see if her foot had grown since birth.

Next Aubrey opened up all her gifts (normally she would have just opened a few and saved the rest for the evening) since she had such a busy day that she wouldn't be home much until after 9 p.m.

Her big gift - this weekend I am taking her and he friend Emma to a fun boutique hotel in Portland for an overnight girl's shopping/eating/relaxing trip.

 Bailey passed along all her dating magazines, books, and talks to her little sister!

 Cute skirts from Modcloth!

 She got a fitbit, just like her Mom and Dad, since she has been so focused on health and fitness lately. (Update: however, she has decided that it might be a little nerdy to wear a fitbit to school, so it is still in the package)

And then Aubrey logged onto the DMV website and printed out her license.  Did you catch that - we didn't have to visit the DMV office!!

And then she drove herself to school. Aaaarrgh! It always makes my heart stop when my kids first start driving. Although, Aubrey is a very safe and confident driver.

 Dan and I met Aubrey at a great little Italian restaurant in downtown Vancouver for a birthday lunch.

Then Aubrey returned to school and did non-birthday related things, although she did get to enjoy some gifts and treats brought to her by her friends.  After school she drove home and changed and then went to an elementary school for a repeat performance of her role from Seussical for a celebration of Dr. Seuss's birthday (which he shares with Aubrey). A handful of kids from her musical theater company performed four songs, and did a fantastic job. The kids were mesmerized!  After the performance she headed to Mutual, and then home to bed. 

Snippets from the past few months . . .

Joseph and Dan attended the basketball game between BYU and Portland State. It was a tough loss for BYU, but the boys had a great time!

 We love our frequent facetimes and calls from this cute college girl.

 I have continued to ruthlessly clear out stuff. It feels fantastic! This was what I got rid of just from the bookcase in the "homeschool" area. We have a lot of books! I gave many away to friends, sold a few, and gave the rest to charity.

 A friend made a "heavy blanket" years ago for her sensory son and she passed it on to us. Joseph likes the feeling of cuddling up under it.  This is him "reading" scriptures with us one night.

 Dan was in charge of the Yule Ball for our stake the end of January. As always, it was an amazing night for all involved and Dan was the best deejay in the world. Aubrey and I attended the dance to "help" Dan. Really, that meant that we watched and enjoyed the ambience while Dan did all the work. Aubrey missed the cutoff for the dance by one month!

 The deejay was unusually relaxed and found time to waltz with his beautiful almost-16-year-old daughter

 and with me!  (Very blurry picture, but I had to record the moment . . .)

Gas is crazy cheap.  Seriously?  This price was with 20 cents off with my Fred Meyer card, but even the normal price of gas is lower than I remember since before Aubrey was born!

 Joseph had to create a game using math facts for his math class, so we tried it out for FHE a few weeks ago.  We all found that the double digit multiplication and decimal multiplication was harder than we remembered!

 The next day I was able to play some of the games with the kids in the math class. It was fun!

 I really should do an entire post about the things I don't like about getting older, but one of them is the increasingly urgent need I have for reading glasses, especially late in the day or in dim light. And reading scriptures absolutely requires glasses these days. Sigh. It's such a bummer. I hate taking the glasses on and off when I read and try to interact with people sitting more than a foot away from me.

Funny story about my glasses. After I had my eyes examined I was uncharacteristically pressured into buying some glasses from the attached optical shop.  And I was in a hurry and didn't really scrutinize them well. They look very nice, but I didn't realize until picking them up that the earpiece is a woman's leg and high heeled shoe. How bizarre!

 Spirit Day at Aubrey's school - she had to wear as many patterns as possible together.  In the picture you can't see that the tights are also patterned.

 Aubrey helped a leader do all the decorations for New Beginnings, which was mid-February. It looked lovely, but not as lovely as these girls!  And, note Aubrey's new very cute glasses! She has a very light prescription and really only needs them for sometimes seeing the board in class, but she likes them and likes the preciseness of the vision correction, so she wears them most of the time!

50 years!

On February 6th our good friends joined us for a party to celebrate Dan, who is not only an amazing husband and father, but also a respected and well-loved friend, co-worker, and neighbor.

To prepare, I started weeks before and sorted through all the memorabilia we have carted with us through our married life but never really organized. I threw out some stuff and categorized and organized everything else. In the end, I was able to pull out some fun memorabilia to display at Dan's party.

Items displayed included the bill from the hospital for Dan's birth, newspapers from the day of his birth, newspaper clippings featuring Dan the cute young kid, papers he wrote in elementary, middle, and high schools, advertisements for his high school deejay service, Cub Scout and Boy Scout patches, his high school ASB card, guitar songbooks from his teenage years, yearbooks, mementos from Israel and Venezuela (where he served his mission), and pictures of our family through the years.

The day of the party I ran to pick up some last minute supplies and I found these flowers for the serving table. I thought it was very funny that the store had inserted a football decoration into a bundle of flowers.  What?  I'm guessing they were aimed at guys who needed to apologize in advance to their wives for spending the weekend in front of the TV?

I bought or prepared all Dan's favorite desserts and munchies: peach pie, German chocolate pie, Chunky Monkey banana cream pie, carrot cake, graham crackers and frosting, mixed nuts, and popcorn.  The other counter also had some fruits and veggies for those who wanted to be healthier.

I had bought some decorations online, including a special 50th birthday set of candles. The problem is, when I dumped out the individual candles I couldn't remember what it was supposed to say!  A few of our friends at the party relished the challenge, and figured out that the individual letters spelled "OH NO THE BIG 50".

Dan had prepared a really fun game to play at the party. The game masterfully involved each of the couples, highlighting our "link" to them and our history with them. Other questions were about music and TV theme shows from the 70s and 80s and multiple choice questions about funny stories from Dan's life. The game was a HIT!  He is probably the only person who would enjoy running the game at his own party! 

We feel so lucky to have such amazing friends. They add so much to our lives and have blessed us in so many ways.

After his party Dan remarked, "that was perfect in every way.  I couldn't have imagined a better night with friends for my birthday."  So, I would say it was a success!