Long Weekend

I forgot to post this on my last update, but this is one of the signs Brynn and her friends created and received permission to put up at her school. It's an anti-bullying poster. She has been excitedly telling Dana and me about this project and how they needed approval from teachers, counselors and the principal in order to put the signs up. The way Brynn explained it to us, students were to sign their names to the sheets as sort of their pledge against bullying. I have been wanting to go and have lunch with Brynn one day at school so that I could at the same time take some pics of her with her signs. However, right before the long weekend break, she brought them home because she and her friends decided that they should type up the names and then re-post the signs. I told her I thought it was great to leave the signatures as is as that was more of a personal pledge, rather than the typed out names. Of course no one wants to listen to Mom, so she forged ahead, but alas hasn't made it very far. Anyhow, I just loved this idea and that she was spearheading this with her friends. 💓

Brynn had off Thursday through today from school so we had been trying to decide what we should do over the long break. Dana took off all the days to be home as he had some time to use up so that he wouldn't lose it and I took off Friday and Monday to be with everyone. The girls came up with another break bucket list. The "Roger? and Jessica!" notation was our attempt of asking our friends and Tessa's family if they would be available to come for a visit, but everyone else already had plans,so we pressed on with the other ideas.

Dana took the girls shopping on Thursday and they otherwise just lounged around home.

Friday morning we woke up to breakfast in bed made by Brynn and Clara! How wonderful.. Brynn made muffins that were very delicious.

Friday seemed like it was going to be the nicest out of all the days, so we decided to knock Detroit Mountain off our list with the hope that it would also be fairly quiet there compared to the other days. Detroit Mountain is in Detroit Lakes and has skiing and snow tubing; we were going to go to take in the snow tubing.

We ran into a couple of issues however. We got to the tubing area and to our delight, it seemed pretty quiet! Well, that was because they were only hosting school groups at the time that we arrived which was around 2:00. They actually didn't open to the public until 4:00 pm. So, we had two hours to kill. I knew they had the Polar Fest going on downtown so we decided to check that out.

They have this really neat ice castle set up down in the park by the lake, but it was very windy coming off of the lake which made it bitterly cold down there. We took a few pics and then left after only a short time.

I wasn't looking at the camera in the below shot because that round ice ball was not attached and I almost knocked it off while we were trying to squish into the ice throne!

After a stop at our friends' new house, we made our way back to Detroit Mountain to try again. We all got our tickets and outfitted with tubes and I went to ask the lift attendant if it was ok if Clara rode with one of us since she's only three. She responded that you need to be four years old to do the tubes. Ack! They hadn't even noticed Clara's short little self when we purchased our ticket to even ask her age or check her height. So, we went back in and discussed inside the lodge. Ultimately, they let her pass this time, but we needed to tube with Clara's tube attached to ours every time. That wasn't a big deal, though, as we probably would have done it anyhow.

Clara didn't go down the hill as many times as the rest of us, but she did have fun. I guess we'll wait until next year to go back!

Saturday was a fairly nice day outside, too, so we did some sledding in our own yard while Brynn was at the last roller staking lesson of the session. We all went back out together after lunch.

Sunday we decided to make brunch after church.

And continue watching the Olympics. We've all gotten pretty into it this year.

Later in the afternoon after it was clear Clara wasn't going to take a nap, we headed over to the library to check off that bucket list activity.

The other thing we wanted to do was a baking day, so after we got home from the library, Clara and I made chocolate chip cookies and Brynn made cupcakes.