Last week was spring break for my school-age cousins. It was too cold for them to go to the beach but the family still wanted to take them somewhere for a few days. So that meant that I had eight guests for a few days last week on about a week’s notice. I don’t have enough beds for eight other people so they stayed at a hotel nearby, but I had a fun few days of family time.

They arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and after I gave everyone a quick tour of my house and I finished my workday we trekked to one of the craziest urban parks I’ve ever seen. This was not my first trip to the Downtown Cary Park, but it was the first time I’d visited with children. They loved it, each enjoying a different part of the play area that suited their age. We followed this up with barbecue and plenty of macaroni and cheese for the kids.

Thursday was colder and it rained most of the day, so the original plan got scrapped and I went with them to a park much closer to my house so that they could play in the morning before the storm hit. My guests then spent several hours shopping at the mall before we ate pizza and had ice cream downtown in what turned into a cold evening. Red velvet was the hit flavor, but I stuck to vanilla as is my custom.

Then on Friday, I worked through the morning (meaning I missed the continuation of the shopping spree) before meeting everyone for their first ever curling game in the afternoon. It was the opening game for me in the annual intra-club tournament. While the adults had watched curling during the Olympics and I’d prepped them some, the children had little idea what was going on as they’d only ever seen hockey as a game played on ice. It meant that I received some very funny videos later, but I couldn’t hear them through the glass while I was playing. Then I worked a little more before meeting everyone again for hamburgers or chicken tenders and then for gelato at a place that was on the back side of a strip mall and that I’d never heard of before. While I probably won’t go again as I prefer the more established local ice cream places, there was a steady stream of people going in and out the whole time we were there. My family left on Saturday morning and the remainder of the weekend (starting at 8:30 A.M.) was dedicated to curling, but that may be next week’s post.