Spring Break 2017

Last week was spring break. The kids were all out of school. Hannah went to Paris with her Grandma Kathy (more on that later). It was just me and the boys for the week.

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A couple weeks ago, my sister April sent me a link to a video on a guy named Robert Lang who does origami for a living - really awesome origami. John has always had an interest in origami, so I showed him the video, and then we looked up some of the guy's books. Our library has a few of them, so a couple weeks ago we checked one out.

Monday, Steven was flipping through the book and in the course of our discussion, the three of us realized that some of the paper sizes were rectangular, rather than square, and that I had a roll of butcher paper. The last project in the book - and possibly the most complicated, was a cuckoo clock that was to be made from a rectangle that was seven times as long as it was wide. John decided to make the cuckoo clock from my roll of butcher paper that was 30 inches wide. When he cut the paper to size, it was 17.5 feet long. It took him six long and often frustrating hours, but he did it!

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Also on Monday, I took Peter to the store to help him find some activity to do so he wouldn't be bored. He selected a box of "Peeps", but I told him that he had to use them for some activity - he couldn't just eat them. So he made a diorama of a playground with them, including a swing, a slide, and a basketball game in the background in full swing.

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On Wednesday, I took the boys to see "Beauty and the Beast" in the theater. We haven't seen a movie in the theater in several years, so this was a special treat. I think John was comparing it to his high school musical from last year, and noticed that several of the songs were different from both the animated movie and the stage version he had performed. I really liked how they cleaned up the timeline - They didn't specify how long the spell had lasted, they explained why the villagers didn't know about the castle so near by, and it explained better what Maurice was doing during the time Belle was at the castle. I also appreciated the explanation of what happened to Belle's mother. I wondered if having "Hermione" play the part of Belle would be distracting, but it really wasn't. I enjoyed the movie, and I think the boys appreciated the outing.

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The other days of spring break were spent doing more normal stuff. Peter played Minecraft and watched YouTube videos. Josh played Pokemon games. John read and worked on his computer programs. It was a nice break from normal routines, and I think the boys returned to school this week ready to dig back in for the last month or two of school.