Baseball and Boogers

It was a beautiful week. Seriously, I think heaven has weather like this all the time (or at least I sincerely hope). Spring in the Hale house reliably brings two things: baseball and allergies.

First off, Luke's allergies. We made our first emergency doctor's visit this week, and while that sounds bad, it's actually a success for Luke to go four whole months without seeing a doctor. Unfortunately, the spring weather brought on a rash that was impervious to our usual treatment regime. We've resisted using steroids for years now, but we finally caved this week and put him on a short course of prednisolone. It's not ideal, and it brought up whether we want to do seasonal steroids or start allergy shots sooner than intended. Let the debate rage. We also switched up his daily maintenance meds because it was apparent anti-histamines are no longer working. We started Cingulair, but that's pretty much a last ditch effort to keep him comfortable. We're slowly sliding the slippery slop to allergy shots.

On a happier note, Max started baseball this week, and he moved up a league this year. His new coach seems fantastic, and we're really optimistic he'll learn a lot this season. I love seeing him back in baseball! It's been too long. All this outside time led to some pretty messy boys this week, and I had to snap a picture of Max's face. This is how boys should look!

Easter and Spring Break

I had to take sometime before recounting our slightly disastrous spring break. That and we've been really busy.

We had the best of intentions with spring break- starting with an overnight trip to Billings to witness Hale's sealing to the three children they adopted. We left Tuesday morning, and the first hour went great. Unfortunately, Jack decided not to sleep in the car, so the rest of the ride was loud and brutal, mostly towards Max who was poked more times than you can even imagine. It was a long car ride. Lunch at Red Robin went well but was crazy rushed, and then we headed over to the temple so Darreck could witness the sealing. I had great intentions to have the boys touch the temple and take a walk around the grounds, but they were more into screaming and running and crawling over everything. It was exhausting and slightly pointless.

We headed out to the mall and then to dinner at HuHot, but by this time, everyone was very tired and cranky. We stopped by Cabela's- when we meant to go to Scheels- and then found out the zoo was going to be closed the next day because of a snow storm. The only reason we decided to stay the night was so that we could go to the zoo. Everyone freaked, and we decided to head home. What followed was four of the most stressful hours of our lives. The weather home was horrible. We went through blinding rain, sleet, and a full-on blizzard. Darreck white knuckled it all the way home, and mercifully, the boys slept. We were just thankful to arrive home alive.

We called Wednesday our rebound day. As a family, we picked out our favorite activities and determined to salavage spring break. We started the day off at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, which the boys loved! It was a blast! The boys picked McDonald's for lunch (of course), and then after nap, we took them to the children's museum. After Pizza Hut, we bought the boys a new movie and a ton of junk food and settled in for family movie night. Rebound day was a total success!

The rest of break was pretty low-key. We spent plenty of time outside, including feeding the ducks and playing at multiple parks. Easter weekend was a great cap to the week. Saturday we had a small Easter egg hunt with the boys, and Easter Sunday was really beautiful and peaceful. Monday we dyed our eggs and immediately went egg rolling. Egg rolling has to be my favorite Canadian tradition, and I'm so glad we've kept it going. I'm not sure what's so fun about chasing eggs down a hill, but it really is a hoot!

Now we're on to the rest of our spring activities. Ahh!