Happy Easter!

 This morning we woke up and did Easter baskets with breakfast. We went to early service as a family so we didn't have a ton of time to get ready.

 

When we left for church, we were greeted with large snow flakes. So this was my first every white Easter. We drove separately because I was also helping with the second service, but luckily the roads weren't slick. However, because it was Easter, I did have to park really far away and we walked in the snow.

 

After church, we did gifts. I know most people don't do gifts for Easter, but we do. This is partly because all our birthdays are in the fall so I usually want to get the kids something for spring by the time Easter rolls around anyway, so I can either do it for Easter or "just because". And it's really the most important holiday there is, so for us it makes sense. Joshua got a sleeping bag because he was the only kid who didn't have one. Clara got her very own pink scooter. And Hannah got her very own big-girl bike.

Next we had Easter dinner with ham, asparagus, and scalloped potatoes, so very traditional.

Finally, we did an Easter egg hunt (definitely inside). The kids enjoyed finding their eggs and we gave them awhile to enjoy their spoils once they were done.

We had a really meaningful and fun day.

Two Ballerinas

Hannah has wanted to go to ballet with Clara for quite some time. We told her she could try it once she was done with soccer. This week was the week of her free trial class. She loved it and Clara loved having her come with her. We plan to enroll Hannah for the rest of the school year.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today we celebrated St. Patrick's Day. We had a nice day. We did our traditional meal of Irish stew and colcannon with mint chocolate chip ice cream for dessert.

Clara loves helping in the kitchen so much. Unfortunately she doesn't have great dexterity so she can't chop yet, but she was able to help pick the mint off the branches to make the ice cream.

Spring Jammies

The kids are really excited about their new spring jammies. Really Hannah doesn't need many because she can wear Clara's ones from last years, but this is not something she would really accept and she also wears jammies both in the evening and during the day so she needs more pairs than usual, so she also got some. She is actually the one driving most of the exciting around the new jammies, though the others also like them.

Mid-March

 I took Hannah to Trader Joe's for the first time. She highly approves of the small shopping carts.

 We started spring swimming lessons. The girls are in one class and Joshua is in another. The girls seem to be enjoying their class.

Joshua only has three kids in his class, including him. The other two are sisters and one time they didn't come so he got a private lesson. He needs to float on his back independently for 15 seconds to move to the next level. I don't think he's close. But I am glad he is getting a little more one-on-one attention in this class.

 This morning class time works out really great because the shallow pool is open for toddler swim so while the girls are doing their lesson, Joshua can play and then when he does his, the girls can play. This is way better than sitting and watching.

Sometimes, when it's warm enough, we play at the playground after swimming. This is a fun park because there are a lot of things that spin, which all the kids enjoy and particularly the older two.

Early March

We got our hardwoods refinished and replaced the carpet in the dining room with hardwood. Which means, we are finally going to have an actual dining room table in our dining room. I still want space for eating in our breakfast nook, though. I decided to put the kids' table in there and then we needed a small table just for Jason and I that is adult-sized. Jason and the kids put it together and then the kids used the box to sit in and eat popcorn while they watched a show.

We had some really great weather and got to take a bike ride to the park. Hannah rode the whole way with no help, which is a first for her. Joshua can now do the monkey bars all by himself, which he is really proud of.

We were able to eat outside one day for lunch. I don't know why Joshua is making that face.

This is a game Halie got Joshua for Christmas. He loves it. It basically throws whipped cream in your face. And the game mechanism is really touchy so almost any time you touch it, it triggers and throws it. He thinks it's the best thing ever even though no one will play with him because normal people don't like that.

Recovering

Joshua has been being pretty rough with his sisters lately.  Although he is generally very sweet and kind to them, sometimes he gets in a mood where he seems to want to hurt them a bit.  Sometimes it's just crashing his body into theirs when they are sitting down.  Tonight, though, he was chasing Clara upstairs while they were playing, and he caught up to her and shoved her in the back, causing her to fall forward and hit her head on the corner of the wall.  I was in a nearby room and was able to quickly get to her, and I could see it was going to be a pretty bad bump, although the skin wasn't broken.  I made an ice pack for her and had her wear it for awhile.  We are going to work with Joshua to try to understand better why he does this, but in the meantime poor little Clara is going to have a welt on her forehead.  Here she is as she recovers in bed.

Bringing Home the Mail and a Pig

I wanted to go get the mail today, and Hannah asked to go with me.  She wanted to ride her bike, since she's still really excited to have her new big girl bike that she got on Easter, which she calls her snowflake bike, because the pattern on it is somewhat like a snowflake.  She brought her pink pig with her, and after getting the mail, I asked if we could put it in the basket with the pig.  She thought that was great, so I put the mail in the basket and made sure the pig still had a good seat, and we headed back home, me on foot and her on the snowflake bike.

Building a Birdhouse

Meghan is doing a unit in school with the kids about birds, and as a project for that, we decided to have me build a birdhouse with the kids.  We bought a kits, and over the course of a few days we painted it, nailed and glued it together, and sealed it.  It was a fun project to do with the kids, and now we're hoping that some birds actually find it to be hospitable enough to live in it.

Hannah's Bed Chair

Hannah has really liked the chair we got her for her room. She likes sitting in it and reading books, but the thing she likes more than anything is sleeping in it. It's not something we even suggested, but she just came up with it on her own, apparently deciding that it is more comfortable than her bed, or at least an equally comfortable alternative. She is just the right size for it, as she can rest her head on the armrest and then either curl her legs up or drape them over the other armrest. She doesn't choose to do it every night, but lately it's been pretty frequent.  It's probably not good for the chair itself, as it's not meant for that, but I'm more interested in Hannah's happiness than the long-term viability of the chair.

Futuristic Ant Farms

Meghan's working with the kids on a school unit on ants.  As part of that, we bought an ant farm.  Apparently ant farms have come a long way since I was a kid.  With this kind, from Antworks, you receive an air-tight container and some ants.  You put the ants in the fridge to get them cold and sluggish, and then you dump them in the container and seal the lid.  The ants warm up and regain their normal activity level, and then they get to work.  The blue gel in the container has everything the ants need to survive, so you don't need to give them food or water.  They just eat and dig their way through the gel, resulting in the classic ant tunnels that you expect in an ant farm, except it looks way cooler.  They are only supposed to survive a few weeks or so, but we've enjoyed it, and it's been fun to check each day to see the progress they've made.

Google Fiber!

We've had Comcast internet for years.  Nobody likes Comcast.  In fact, it's probably one of the most despised companies in America.  But, they were what we've used.  They provided a mediocre product at average prices, but really there weren't any better options.  But... that has all changed.  The gigabit revolution is upon us!  Google announced in 2010 that they were starting Google Fiber as a way to bring fiber-based internet to certain cities in the US, which would result in blazing internet speeds.  In 2011 they announced that the first city to get it would be...  Kansas City!  However, roll-out was really slow, and it wasn't until 2012 that it was up and running anywhere, and it wasn't until last year that it even reached Olathe, which was well behind the initial schedule.  Since then, they are now up and running in several other metro areas around the country.

The first to offer gigabit internet (1000 Mbps, or 1 Gbps) in Olathe was Consolidated Communications, a regional company that was formerly SureWest and then Everest before that.  AT&T, like Google, was planning to offer the service to our part of Johnson County, but Consolidated Communications didn't need to do all the digging that those two companies needed to do, so they blasted out mailers to everyone hoping to get people to buy in before Google and AT&T had their gigabit service ready.  (By the way,  I hope years from now I look back on this post and am amazed that I was actually by these speeds, which hopefully are woefully slow in a decade or so.)  I was excited to get much faster internet service, so I was going to choose one of them, and I had my eye on Google, so I held out despite CC's overtures.  Last summer, AT&T dug up our back yard, and Google dug up our front yard to install their equipment, and they began taking sign-ups in the neighborhoods that then had infrastructure in place ("fiberhoods").  AT&T's product, Gigapower, was probable fine, but their customer services is notoriously bad.  Google gets rave reviews for their customer service, and I also generally trust them more as a company, at least in terms of products and technology.  So I signed up with them and waited and waited.  Finally a few weeks ago, they dug the line from the curb up to my house, and today was my scheduled installation of service.  I was so happy to see that rainbow rabbit truck in front of my house.

We went with the TV and internet package, so this also meant we said goodbye to Dish Network, which we've actually really liked.  We've had a great experience with them and have had them since 2003 or so.  The product is really good, and customer service is solid.  But it was going to be much cheaper to go with Google's TV offering (and I'll finally get FS1, FSMW, and other channels, so more K-State and more Royals!).  So goodbye Dish (we'll miss you), and goodbye Comcast Xfinity (we won't miss you), and hello Google Fiber!  So far, the TV is great, and the internet is super fast.  With Comcast I would get, on average, 30-ish Mbps down, and 12 Mbps up.  Now I get 250 to 350 Mbps down and similar speeds up.  So pretty much a tenfold increase.  And that's wirelessly, using my laptop.  If I plug in directly to the Fiber box, I get around 950 Mbps down!  There's the gigabit beauty in all its glory!  That won't be a reality for us, because we'll mostly be using our laptops wirelessly, but it's still way, way better even wireless.  So I'm very excited.  Fast internet and more K-State and more Royals.  What could be better?

Brothers Golfing

 When my mom married Ron, I ended up with two new brothers. That could have turned out poorly. After all, I was going to be spending a lot of time with these guys for the rest of our lives, and there are many people who can't stand their family members. But it couldn't have worked out better. Matt and David are great guys. I love them as my brothers, and I also really enjoy hanging out with them. My sisters expanded the group of us guys by bringing Andrew and Kirk into the fold. Again, I struck gold. The five of us are the guys in our generation of the Nicholl clan, and I feel so blessed that I really like every one of them.  Matt and David will each have daughters by the end of this year (Matt sooner, and David later), and Andrew will soon have another son, so I wanted to organize an event for all of us to hang out before everyone's lives get busier.  Kirk is still in Houston with Joanna (for now - thankfully they'll be moving back some time this summer), so I knew it would just have to be me, Andrew, Matt, and David.

I'd heard good things about Topgolf, so I thought that would be a fun activity for us to do.  So tonight was the night that worked for all of our schedules.  Topgolf is really fun, because you don't necessarily have to be good at golf.  You play in a bay that looks out over an expanse of turf that has multiple targets worth different point values.  So even if you don't hit it very far, or if you slice it or hook it, there's still a chance you'll end up with some points.  We played for a couple hours and enjoyed some surprisingly good food and some frosty beverages.  We talked about random topics, and those of us with babies offered advice to those of us without babies.  And we smashed tons of golf balls all over the place.  Andrew started off really well, David was steady throughout, and Matt finished strong and held off a last-minute comeback attempt by me to win the title for the night.  It was a really fun night, and I'm really happy we were able to squeeze it in.

Two Scottie Dog-Loving Girls

My heritage, like nearly every American at this point, is a mix. Mostly Norwegian, then Swedish, then Scottish, then Irish.  The Scottish part comes mostly from my Grandma Hall’s side.  She has always been proud of it, and I got the most exposure to it when we lived with my grandparents in ’88 and ’89.  I got to go to Robert Burns-related events, outdoor Scottish games (my first exposure to the awesome caber toss event), etc.  And of course my grandma has always had various Scotland-themed items around her house.  Partly because of this, I developed an affinity for the same things.  I think tartans are really cool.  Incidentally, K-State just unveiled their first official tartan.  And while I don’t know whether Scottish people think things like that are a nice homage to the Scottish heritage or an inauthentic, pandering knock-off, I thought it was pretty cool to have my school work to create something based on a part of my heritage that I love.  I’ve always liked tartans, especially after it was explained to me that they are all actually different and therefore are unique to each clan or whichever entity has registered it.  And then there are bagpipes.  Bagpipes are the coolest instrument on the planet.  I love hearing them any time the opportunity arises.  Aside from those, the thing that perhaps has most inundated popular culture is the Scottie dog (actually a Scottish Terrier).  People love Scottie dogs, and rightfully so.  

Hannah, as has been noted on this blog many times, is very picky about her clothing.  She flat-out refuses to wear many things.  But for the things she accepts, she latches on to some of them pretty strongly.  Meghan bought this Scottie dog outfit for Hannah at Costco. Hannah wanted it, but Meghan was worried she wouldn’t wear it because of the tights, but Hannah ended up loving tights and loving the outfit.  Hannah now wears it every chance she gets, which is any time she finds it in her drawer, which is immediately after it has been washed the previous time.  Every time she has worn it, I’ve thought about how my grandma would really like the outfit and would especially like that it’s basically Hannah’s current favorite outfit.  So today when Hannah wore it, I decided to drive the kids over to Grandpa and Grandma’s house so we could all hang out for awhile and also so Grandma could get to see Hannah in her outfit.  We had a good time there, and here is the picture of the two girls who each love at least one thing about Scotland.

Plump Joshua

Joshua, like most people, or hopefully all people, normally wears no more than one pair of pajamas each night.  A couple nights ago, he wanted to wear two pairs of jammies, so we let him.  Tonight he decided to take it a step, or several steps, further by putting six pairs of jammies on at once.  I wasn't going to let him wear them all night, because he'd get too hot, but before I had him take off the extras, I took this picture.  If Joshua were really overweight, I guess this is what he would look like.

Pizza Street

Meghan wasn't making dinner tonight and suggested that I could just take the kids out for dinner somewhere.  Since she wasn't going to be with us, I decided to go to a place that wouldn't be her favorite, but that the kids and I would like, since it would be a perfect time to do it.  We went to Pizza Street, which is an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet.  We all loved it, especially the desserts.  It's affordable and decidedly downscale, but it made for a fun dinner for us.

"Ice skating and ice cream! Hey, that rhymes!"

For today's date day with Clara, I decided to take her ice skating.  We did it last year, which was a good start for her, and I had done it the year before with Joshua.  I thought I would do it this year with Hannah, but she didn't really seem ready for it and wasn't really interested anyway.  This is the last weekend it's open this year, so when thinking about things to do with Clara for our date day, I thought maybe she would like to go again.  We started with pizza inside Crown Center.  With any young kid, you try to take them potty a lot so they don't have to go at inopportune times.  I had taken her before we left, so I thought we'd be good for awhile.  We waited in a long line for our pizza (Crown Center on a weekend is always busy) and found a table in the commons area after a brief wait for one to become available.  We sat down to enjoy our pizza, and Clara tells me she has to go potty.  Whenever she says this, she almost always adds that she has to go "really bad" and makes this wincing, in-pain face like it's an emergency.  She's known to have a flair for the dramatic, so I think some of that is for show.  This created a dilemma for me, because we'd just sat down with our drinks and our pizzas, and we're in a public place.  I can't take our uncovered food slices into the bathroom, because that's gross, and I can't just leave our stuff there unattended.  I considered if I could just convince her to wait until we were done eating, which she probably could have done.  But if I'm wrong on that, she has pee-soaked clothes, and that kind of ruins our date day.  I noticed a nice-looking family at the table nearest ours.  It was a couple about my age with three small kids.  I figured they could sympathize with my plight, and I asked them if they could watch our food while we went to the bathroom.  I decided to evoke a little sympathy by telling them that I couldn't believe she had to go again when we had just recently gone, and I was 100% sure as a family with three small kids that they could relate.  They seemed more than happy to help me, so I took Clara to the bathroom, and then we came back and finished our pizza after I thanked them profusely.  I took a chance that we would not drop dead while ice skating because they laced our pizzas with cyanide while we were gone, and it turns out I gambled and won on that one, so it all worked out fine.

I'm pretty sure we don't need six pictures of her skating, but I've already pared these down from the roughly three billion that I originally took, so whatever.  But here she is, doing an amazing job.  I was really impressed with how much better she was compared to last year.  She was able to go around the entire rink by herself, albeit very slowly.  Sometimes I would hold her hand or hands while we skated, but I found that she would fall more often when we did that, as if she was too dependent on my hands.  When I encouraged her to go by herself, her patented determination took over, and she focused on it and could go on her own and rarely fall.  We did it for quite awhile, as she enjoyed it, even though I could tell it was physically and mentally exerting for her.

On every date day, I try to get a picture of me with the kid who's date day it is, so here are some cute pictures of me and Clara together.

Afterward we went back in Crown Center to get some ice cream.  When I told Clara of that plan, I said something like, "Okay, now we're down with ice skating, so let's go get some ice cream."  She then exclaimed, "Ice skating and ice cream!  Hey, that rhymes!"  She doesn't quite understand rhyming, but close enough.  On the way to get ice cream we had to go up an elevator.  She was very unsure of this.  She initially couldn't even bring herself to step on it (the picture on the left), leading me to have to go run back down the up escalator.  She built up her confidence, and on the second attempt, she got on, and was pretty proud of herself (the picture in the middle).  Then she liked it so much, she wanted to go up and down a couple more times (the picture on the right).  We had a lot of fun today, and I was really proud of her for improving so much at ice skating and in conquering her fear of the escalator.