STAY- cation

Welcome to our stay-cation. The kids have this week off of school for February break. This might come as a bit of a surpise to anyone who has never lived in New England, but it is a standard vacation for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont schools. We guess it serves one of two purposes--either (a) giving families a chance to go skiing (kind of like extra days off in the south for the start of deer season) or (b) giving families a chance to head someplace warm and keep their sanity in the dead of winter up here. Either way, we find this little quirk of New England endearing. Ted has even decided to take some leave from work and enjoy the week with us, so we planned a vacation at home.

Yesterday we kicked off the week with a little experiment. I purchased these 'crystal growing kits' last year with all kinds of good intentions, but found them still in the closet months later. When we pulled them out, I thought this week might be a good time to use them, so yesterday after church we got the kids suited up in their safety gear and began measuring, heating, mixing and observing.

We'll post pictures of the finished products later.

Today we headed to American Girl so the girls could spend some of the money they've been saving. Riley has been saving diligently, and was just a few dollars from being able to purchase a new doll. We decided to float her some money (unlike the gov't, we actually have the money to float her) so she could buy a doll. Mary Beth was eager to get one of the "chairs" they have for the dolls to be able to sit at a table next to you. Even though I had explained that these chairs won't fit onto our table, she was insistent. Quite honestly, of our children, she's notorious for being indecisive, so the fact that she had something in her head that she knew without a doubt she wanted, made it easy for me to just go with it.

Of course, we couldn't just go to the American Girl store--Cory is old enough now to know that there are much cooler toys for him, so we journeyed to Wal-Mart so he could pick out something from their toy department. He found some Hot Wheels accessories that would connect to something he got at Christmas, so he's good now, too.

And now Ted and I have a pile of coins from the kids --they spent their own money on these things, today, and very little of their money is ever anything but quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.