A visit and a date

My parents had planned to come up for a 22 hour visit on Valentine's Day, but because of snow last weekend, they came up this Friday afternoon instead. Nadia and Ian could hardly wait for them to get here! When they arrived we had dinner, and then Nadia and Paul left for basketball practice. My mom brought them a bag of conversation heart candy, and all three kids thoroughly enjoyed this treat. Nadia enjoyed reading the words on her hearts. Yesterday morning my parents took her to a make-up gymnastics class. She usually goes on Monday nights, but one of her classes was cancelled due to snow. We met them at church for her 11:00 basketball game. The Leopards had played well their first game and then played poorly the next two weeks. Paul was very relieved that they played much better yesterday. Although they don't keep score with the K/1st grade games, their team would have won if they had kept score. Nadia attempted to make a basket twice (not anywhere close). In general she actually played better the first game, but she did do more dribbling yesterday. She's by far the weakest player on their team, but she's having fun and learning some new skills.

After the game we came home and had lunch and Nadia and Ian had some more time with my parents while Oliver napped before they left at 3pm. As you can see from the photo, Ian took his nap during the end of the basketball game. Around 4pm Kathy arrived at our house. She babysat our kids once in October, and the kids enjoyed spending time with her again last night. Usually our dates are 3 hours long, but this time I asked for 4 hours so we would have time to play miniature golf. We've really been in a rut the past four years - all of our dates have involved shopping and a meal. We did go to TGIFridays (our "usual" in part because I can get gift cards to that restaurant through our credit card points) and did buy Paul a new pair of sneakers, but we also did 34 holes of miniature golf at a glow in the dark miniature golf place in the mall. It had been years since we've gone golfing. Paul did much better than I did. This summer we need to take the kids miniature golfing outdoors sometime!