Thursday April 24th

1. I can hardly believe that it is almost the end of April. The weather has been super nice. We are consistently in the high 50's each day now and the lake is starting to break up. There is hope !!! :)


2. Rainey only has 15 more days of attending kindergarten. It seems like the year flew by and now she will be a 1st grader next  year and they will have a whole new batch of kindergarteners arriving at the school.


3. Rainey and I had such a nice Easter weekend in Arizona. Tom was there with us but he was busy skydiving. We went to a farm something like Schpeff farms and they had Easter egg hunts. I signed us up for it about 6 weeks in advance and when we got there on Saturday morning it was really well organized and I just said our last name and she had an envelope with all our tickets and stuff in it. The weather was in the 80's and really not hot at all and the sky was such an amazing blue that went on forever. I think that is one thing that is really different from Alaska to Arizona. We have clouds and lots of them. Fluffy, big white clouds most of the time with the dark ones easy to spot with rain etc. In Arizona they do not seem to have that many clouds and just this vast blue sky that stretches out forever.


4. After Easter Egg hunting I realized we were only 11 miles from the San Tan mall which is one of our favorite malls so we headed over there to do some shopping at Gymboree and at Build a Bear. The Easter bunny did not visit us this year and so we bought our own Easter gift :) Then back to the hotel. Actually Tom did not jump on Saturday because he had to work in the hotel room. He is super super busy this spring. He did get to jump with his coach on Sunday and half a day on Monday before we left for the airport.


5. Rainey and I swam in the pool on both Saturday and Sunday and she is almost ready to swim. She had a scare last summer when we were in Portland and it has taken her a while to get comfortable in a pool again. She loves to play in the ocean in Hawaii so it is just the pool that is a bit off putting for her. We did have private lessons last fall but she was so hesitant to get off the step and finally started hating it so I dropped the swim lessons and thought we would start again this summer in group lessons at the Chugiak High School pool which is were I learned to swim :)


6. On Easter we went to Pump it Up ( a kids play zone that she loves ) and they had Easter Egg hunting. After that we went to Sweet Tomatoes for our lunch. Side note. We can be in and out of Sweet Tomatoes in under 20 minutes and it is healthy for her and for me. She gets the same stuff and so we know what to put on her plate and it is better than the drive through at Mcdonald's. Then we went shopping at the World Market neither Rainey nor I had ever been in a World Market and we are hooked. I mean hooked !!! I almost want to buy another suitcase next time and fill it up with goodies from World Market. Except for then I look around at all the stuff in my house that I have no where to put it and think I should probably exercise some judgement :)


7.Up early and had the suitcases packed and in the car by 7:30 am. We dropped Tom off at the drop zone and headed to Pump it up. It is about 45 minutes from the drop zone in Tempe. We played from 9 am to 11 am and then went to Sweet Tomatoes for lunch :) and then we found a new mall called  Arizona Mills but we only had an hour to look around and decided next time it was going to be OUR mall or our GO TO favorite mall !!! back to drop zone, pick up Tom headed to the airport, returned the car, got on the bus, checked in, security and on the plane with a non stop back to Anchorage. We were home back in Anchorage at 9 pm and home by 10:30 and in bed by 10:45 :)


8. I was invited to go to a Volunteer luncheon at the school for being "an outstanding volunteer" . It is on  April 30th.


9. All kids who have birthdays in the summer get to have a date for an "unbirthday" at school and Rainey's day is on April 29th. I have a really cute idea for the cupcakes. We have three more Girl Scouts for the school year and then on the 24th of May I am going to have an end of the year cook out for the girls. Then we are headed into summer and I am going to have it once a week for two hours just so they can have an hour for scouts and an hour to play outside.


10. Rainey has shown some interest in tap dancing so in addition to her ballet I am going to let her take tap dancing this summer for the first 5 week session and see if it is something that interests her to continue with her ballet into the winter. We will see.


11. Ok well that is enough for now. I need to get some work done, some bills paid, some grocery shopping done, some laundry done AND put away and I need to pick up the kitchen.