Dawson Family Holiday

For the third year in a row we celebrated our very own family holiday the first weekend of Spring. We started the tradition because normal holidays can become frustrating with coordinating with two other households....so we created a day that is special only to us...and therefore there is no competition and it gives us a relaxed family day. We typically celebrate the warm weather, spring and being able to enjoy the outdoors again. This year we had PERFECT weather and rather than just celebrate on one day we sort of extended the activities thru the entire weekend....

On Friday, the kids wanted to see where I worked so we loaded up the truck and headed to "ZR". We had a great dinner together, walked around and window shopped and then made our way to my new office. I had never been there after 5 but I had a cool electronic key that I knew would get us in....the kids fought over who would get to open the next door and we even got to use it in the elevator. I showed them my office, my beautiful new iMac which was named Eve (get it? apple....eve....never mind) and then they were all dieing to try coffee or hot chocolate from Flavia the coffee machine. This thing is awesome! It makes hot chocolate, iced and hot mocha's, chocolate lattes (though I need to tell it this is the same as a mocha), hot tea, iced tea, tea lattes, coffee, cappuccino, latte, espresso and many other combinations. It is AWESOME and I love her! The kids were very pleased and spent the rest of our time there fighting over who gets to come to work with me first. Eli really wants to be my assistant and is trying to figure out how to miss school 5 days a week to work with me. They are all very sweet and I love it they want to be with me. They LOVE working at the coffeehouse with me and seem to think an office will be just as exciting. Hmm...

On Saturday, we celebrated like any preteen and teen family would by sleeping in! It may have been because we stayed up late watching movies on Friday but either way, it was a great way to start our Dawson Family Day! We packed a picnic lunch and headed to one of our favorite parks, "SMP". Scott grilled our favorite corn (which we lather with lime mayo, garlic, Cajun spices and Parmesan cheese...oh YuM!), we threw around the football and Frisbee and got Lady Bug to play along too. She caught the Frisbee for the first time and we were all so excited! Lady Bug LOVED it! It was very cute to watch. After we had our fill of lunch, we took the pups to their swimming beach and let them exhaust themselves! On our way home from the park we stopped off at Baskin Robbins to try their new Firehouse ice cream. (I had BOGO coupons!) It has red hots in it and is was pretty good! And then we rented two movies and stayed up late all curled up on the couch....It was a great family holiday and I can't wait till next year! *I havent had time to make my normal collages....so here is a quick and easy one of all the pics from our day at the park. Try to ignore the annoying watermark.