Sometimes...

Sometimes you have the brilliant idea to register your children for Spring swimming lessons. "It is such a good idea", you think to yourself, "it will be a fun spring activity and then they will be all ready for summer!"

(And sometimes you end up going out of town the weekend that you have to register and so your husband wakes up at 5:30 on a Saturday morning to register for you.)

And then SOMETIMES you forget that you signed up for swimming lessons because you are super sick on the Monday that lessons start and your kids miss their lesson, and you realize that you scheduled a Hale Center Theater Play date-night on the Friday of their lessons. And then SOMETIMES after already taking them on the Tuesday of lessons, it's Wednesday and you think that their lessons start at 4:30 instead of 4:00 because your pregnant brain just... can't. So your kids only end up going 2 of the 5 days of the first week.

So then, sometimes, you teach your kids what "bribery" means by telling them about the word and then taking them out for pizza and letting them eat TWO bowls of ice cream for dinner in exchange for them promising not to complain or make a big deal about missing swimming lessons. (And then you promise to take them early the next day so that they can have the extra swimming time that they missed out on.)

Thank goodness "sometimes" doesn't happen all the time. But also, sometimes "sometimes" does happen, and that's okay.

March Madness 2019

Here a few pictures from March Madness 2019. This is one of my favorite traditions and Shantel is so good to make a giant bracket for us to follow the games (and to often put kids to bed on game nights so I don't miss anything). 

Caleb, Lydia and Austin all picked brackets. The funniest thing this year was Lydia trying to explain to Caleb and Austin about how picking the lower number is the team that is more likely to win, only then she went and picked a bunch of upsets. Meanwhile, Austin was determined to win and made sure to pick all of the teams "more likely to win." Caleb had fun picking as well. 

Shantel is the best. She really takes her time to make picks. I pulled up the site for her to make picks and she was like, "what about the website with all the information about the teams." It took me a second and then I realized she wanted me to pull up fivethirtyeight which calculates the statistical chances of each team to advance.

Super hard to see, but below you can see Shantel was ranked number 34,000 and was in the 100%. She was rocking it.

We promised a candy bar to the winner and the kids were excited (mostly because we told them we would share if Shantel or I won.)

And the winner was...Shantel with her 4th straight Peaden March Madness Challenge Victory. Congratulations Shantel! Also- the real winner was me. I really loved watching games with Shantel and the kids. Plus, Virginia completed the all time turnaround after being the first 1 seed to lose to a 16 seed last year, they had multiple incredible finishes including late game winning and buzzer beating shots and won the Championship. 

Train Watching

Before we moved into our house we did extensive research on what it would be like to live with a train running through our backyard. We even went to a similar neighborhood in North Salt Lake and knocked on people's doors to ask them what it was like to live there (when we bought our house the FrontRunner wasn't actually running yet). We got some great advice "There are two kinds of people, those who can live by a train and those who can't." We decided that we are the kind of people who can (totally an upgrade from living right next to I-15 and having constant noise) and - except for a brief moment in time about two months after moving in when I was up at 2:00 a.m. nursing Lydia and I thought "We've made a terrible mistake!" - we've fully enjoyed living here. 

Hello, not having neighbors in our backyard? TOTALLY worth it. 

Also, this: 

Our kids love watching the train go by. Caleb can hear it coming before anyone else (those two year olds seem more attuned to the train, they haven't been as desensitised and are genuinely more excited about it). Whenever he (or anyone else) hears the train coming, they all yell "TRAIN" and run to the window and watch the train go past. They love it.

And I love this view. My kids, in their pajamas, hopping out of my bed (where they've been snuggling together on a weekday morning) to watch the train go past. Life doesn't get much better than this.