Spring Break Didn't Break Me!

Best Spring Break EVER. 

My honey took off work for all of it plus one day... SWEET!

We begged Amanda to play hooky from school on Thursday so we could get a head start on all the festivities. And then we begged friends of ours to take their 4 boys out of school that day too and join us in our insubordinate behavior. gasp. I'm pretty sure that less than a millisecond lapsed between the begging and the agreeing to our absurd idea.

days 1-3:

Camping as a whole family for the first time ever. We arrived at Kelly Park a day before spring break started and thank goodness. The place got c.r.o.w.d.e.d. on the afternoon of day two.
The Casablanca kids and the Gove kids got along wonderfully. They kept disappearing together but we always knew where they were... I'll let you know how later on in this post.

We spent the first day setting up camp and then went for a walk to check out the spring. We didn't think it would be warm enough to swim in yet apparently we were wrong. After much begging by the children we agreed to come back the next day (at the warmest time of the day) and let them test out the waters.

All hands on deck! It took a village to set up this tent!

They all wanted to jump in SO BAD!

The only thing that would lure the kids away from the spring was the promise of time at the playground...

But the kids weren't the only one's having fun! Go Jocelyn!

Samantha spent most of camp with her shoes off. Most heard phrase at camp: "Sammy-Sue! Where's Your SHOES!??!?!"

That's one happy camper!

Daddy and Sammy hanging out together


On day two another family joined us for the afternoon.
We went on a hike around and through the park
and ended up at the spring again. 

Gluten-Free Layer Bars

So these are the gluten-free bars I made for game night last weekend.

Don't look much like bars, do they...

Though they did cut nicely into rectangles -sort of-,

they were extremely sticky and required much

licking of fingers.

I followed this recipe from allrecipes.com

with a couple of modifications based on some reviews.

click on the recipe to enlarge

So no peanuts and I added a Gluten-Free Ginger Snap crust.

I think next time I'll try pressing the ingredients
into the pan more to make it more dense.

Overall it was a super easy recipe that didn't
require any mixing and way easy to clean up.

and by the way, Reynold Wrap No-Stick Foil is totally 'da bomb'.

Would you try this recipe? 

Do you have any other super easy gluten-free desserts?

You would think it was summer already... or at least Spring Break. We've got a few more days till that starts around here, but don't tell Amanda or the rest of my little monkeys. Somehow chalk drawing on the sidewalk turned to chalk painting (mixing water with the chalk), and when that wasn't enough Amanda broke out the paint and a paint brush and started face painting.





 










Later on, and unfortunately not documenting in photographs, I sent them inside to put their swimsuits on while I cleaned up a little... I was ready and waiting with a hose to clean them off along with the sidewalk and driveway. This ended in them being much dirtier than they were to start with. Needless to say the first mud tracks of the season came through my front door and around the corner to the bathroom.

And I was only a teeny-tiny bit upset about it. :)

12 of 12 Challenge

1. Saturday morning tradition
2. Yard work
3. Keeping the little ones occupied during yard work
4. Picking Amanda up from a sleepover
5. Slurpee break
6. Someone must have stayed up mighty late at that sleepover (wink, wink)
7. My honey playing Civilization
8. We had camera shy friends over for dinner/games - this is what was left of Sammy's haystacks
9. Green cherries? who knew - great alternative for our red dye 40 sensitive boy though
10. One of the games we played
11. Where's Sammy? I see toes!
12. What was left at the end of the night of our super-sticky, 7-layer, gluten-free bars.

I'm linking up with a different Amy G  HERE

Post edit:

There really should be a pre-#1 picture of the first thing I did on the 12th, but I totally spaced about the challenge and didn't bring my camera. I spent an hour of the morning having breakfast with a friend... if I had taken a picture, it would've looked like this....Me: in a bright green oscar the grouch sweatshirt, Cathy in full on Grumpy attire, and the ever so pretty princess Garla, late to the ball we were having at Einsteins. :) It was a good day!