Hello again from Kansas City.  Jana and I wanted to check in since it has been a while.  We have had a busy couple of months.

Ellie turned 7 on March 30th and we had a party for her at Emerald City Gymnastics.  We had 14 of her classmates there running around screaming and having a good time.  She got a lot of good loot and both her and Kaitlyn were able to burn off enough energy to sleep like stones that night. 

A few weeks after that, we had our family party at our house. I stayed up all night smoking a pork shoulder for dinner and I must say, "Nailed it."  Tricia, Karen and the boys, and my family were all able to make it and the girls got a ton of great stuff and had a wonderful day.  One of the girls' presents was a trip to Great Wolf Lodge which we took that following Monday.  We rode waterslides and swam in the pools there for 9 solid hours.  The girls really enjoyed it and I must say that Jana and I enjoyed it as well.



Last Saturday, Jana and I ran in a Warrior Dash with a group of our friends.  If you aren't familiar with that, it is a 3 mile race where you have to complete obstacles like climbing over cargo nets, crawling through the mud under barb wire, and jumping over fire.  It was a balmy 55 degrees and overcast but we had a blast and I even got third in the beard contest.  The next day, to celebrated my Dad's birthday, we went to the Royals game.  We got to the stadium early and tailgated for a while before heading in to the game.  All of the kid activities at the park were free so the kids had a good time and the Royals won 9-0 so the adults had a good time as well.

Kaitlyn turned 4 on May 4th so we had another party for her at Ernie Miller Nature Center.  They had a fun animal show where they got to see an owl, a ferret, and a snake.  The kids loved the show and had once again, Kaitlyn got a bunch of great presents from her friends.  Now comes the hard part of finding room for all of this stuff.  Jana and I decided that we may need to purge the system a little bit to make some space.

Finally, Ellie is playing soccer and softball this spring.  She is really enjoying both and has improved a lot in the past year.  Kaitlyn will be playing T-ball for the first time.  This will be her intro into organized sports so we are excited to see how she does.  We suspect she will stand in the dug-out and be too shy to actually play!

We are looking forward to our trip to Chicago over Memorial Day weekend.  We bought our train tickets and the girls are excited since they've never rode on a train like that before.  We just hope the weather is nice!

John, Jana, Ellie, and Kaitlyn