The best days are now!

"Mama I want to color me!"

2012-01-09T20:41:00.000-08:00

So after being away from my blog for a looong time, I'm back! Mason and I did a fun project today, and I thought I would share it. Marlie and I were in the garage/school room working. It was so beautiful outside that we had the garage door open. Mason came running over and said, "Mama I want to color me!" Now when Marlie was little that was a scary thought, because she literally would color all over her arms and legs just about every day. But I knew what Mason meant! So I grabbed some paper and we got to work

We are using very thick, packing paper. Anything that's really thin will rip on the concrete.

I usually tape the paper down with masking tape, but we were all out. Mason grabbed some bricks and helped me put them on the corners of the paper to hold it down. He layed down and struck a pose, LOL. I used a thick black sharpie to draw his outline. He loves it when I draw his fingers, so I made sure to draw them too. It doesn't have to be perfect, just the basic shape of your kiddo.

As soon as I was done tracing, Mason got busy "coloring me!". He likes to trace over my black line with his markers.

Tracing his fingers...

Drawing a "scary guy" on his shirt...

It wasn't long before he dragged the Lakeshore dot markers out. I like them better than paint for big floor projects like this. See the cute face he made on himself? After about an hour Mason was done with coloring himself. We rolled up flat Mason, and will bring him out again tomorrow. By the end of the week, he will be covered in color :-)

My first craft fair!

2011-10-14T23:32:00.001-07:00

After all these years of crafting for myself and my family, I'm finally selling at a craft fair tomorrow. I am a little nervous and excited all at the same time. I mean, what if I sell nothing, or what if I sell out of everything!? I sewed some girls tiebags and key chains. I also made woven hair barretts and a variety of hair clips. I have some fun ideas for displaying everything, so I'll be sure to snap some pictures tomorrow. Wish me luck!!

A little underwater starting school...

2011-09-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

I think maybe I've spread myself a little too thin this fall. I think I do that to myself a lot, ((sigh)) Anyway, we started school, yay! Our first week was last week, it went better than expected.

Bryce is in 10th grade at The Met high school. He's hoping to land a super amazing internship at a recording studio this year. We are crossing our toes that they will take a high school intern...He has a new advisory teacher who is asking much more of him than last years teacher. So far, he is rising to the occasion.

Marlie is 4th grade this year. She will be working on Singapore math, BJU English and Spelling, Pathway Readers, Beautiful Feet California History, Can Do Cursive, Simple Machines for science, and Draw Squad.

This little stinky cried all morning the first day of school. He wanted to go to preschool, "I don't wanna stay with you mama". Hrm, I've never had one like this before!

Blake is 7th grade. We are using Rod and Staff English, Key to Series, Teaching Textbooks, Draw Squad, Signing Times, Wordly Wise 3000, Sonlight Readers and I still haven't decided for science and history (how lame is that!? but in my defense he takes a history and science class 2 days a week, so I don't have to do a full curriculum) I really should figure it out though...

I should have a picture of me up here. Yes, as if I don't have enough to do, I'm a part-time college student this semester. It's been about 3 weeks, and I sort of feel on top of the work. It's hard to balance everything though, and my crafty stuff is taking a back seat. I think I'm just going to have to deal with less sleep or something though because Christmas is coming... But for now it's studying, bah!

Craft camp recap part 2

2011-07-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

For craft camp I plan a sewing project for day 1 and then one that takes up Tues-Fri. We cook something simple most days, and do a craft project. So here's what the week looked like...

Monday-
sewing- ice packs
cooking- berry cobbler
craft- paint ceramic figurines from Michaels

Tuesday-
sewing- Tokoyo Tie bag from the book Sew Everything Workshop
cooking- shortbread cookies
craft- woven barrettes

Wednesday-
sewing- Tokoyo Tie bag
cooking- pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (a recipe I have scribbled on a scrap of paper)
craft- beaded necklaces and bracelets

Thursday
sewing- Tokoyo Tie bag
cooking- not edible, but still cooking...We made lotion :-)
craft- American Girl pencil toppers

Friday-
sewing- Tokoyo Tie bag
cooking- no cooking today
craft- scrapbook about our week, and finish pencil toppers

So as you can see, it was a very busy week. I don't recommend doing sewing with only one adult and 10 girls, it was really hard. Last year I had my mom's help and it went much more smoothly. It was very tough to sew without her. Thankfully she came on Friday and helped us finish up the bags.

If you are thinking about hosting your own craft camp, be realistic about what you can handle. It's perfectly fine to start out with 3 days and not 5. Don't have 20 of your daughters best friends come either, LOL! 6 or 7 is a reasonable size to start with the first year you host a camp. Plan projects that are fun, but not too complicated. The woven barrette is a good example. It was too hard for half of the girls, some of them got so frustrated that they gave up, and went outside to play. I felt bad, but lesson learned. They should have been a little older or I should have had a helper for that project. Simple is good! The 99 cent ceramic figurines that they painted were a hit. Of course you have to remind them to slow down and take their time, but they loved the freedom to work without needing instructions.

Happy Craft Camping!!!

Craft Camp recap part1

2011-07-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

This was year two that I ran a week long craft camp for Marlie's friends. It was so much fun, and so much work, all at the same time! I've had a few friends ask what projects we did, and such so they can duplicate something like it. So here's the re-cap...

Basic info, I charged $40 for the week (but I got all my craft stuff on super sale, so it worked fine being that low). Camp runs from 10-2. They bring their own lunches and water bottles. I have a babysitter that I pick up at 9:30. She occupies Mason, feeds him lunch, and puts him to bed at12:30 (when her mom picks her up.) I absolutely could not do it without a babysitter for Mason! This year my sitter could only help me 3 of 5 days, so my gf's helped the other days.
Last year I had 7 girls at camp, this year I had 10. Last year I had help from my mom during sewing time. This year she wasn't able to come until Friday.

So first off, we do a word of the day. I use lessons from here. We used, Kindness, Harmony, Patience, Joy, and Generosity. I didn't do this last year, but I'm so glad we did this year. It was really important for all the girls to be kind, patient etc... all week. There's only one of me, and 10 of them! We spend about 15 minutes talking about the word, and how it applies to us at craft camp.

Okay that's it for pat 1. I"m tired, I'll write part 2 tomorrow :-)

Summer projects

2011-06-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm a summer project mom. I do stuff in the fall winter and spring, but summer is my big project time. Last summer, my summer to do list was pretty long. It was long and maybe a little too ambitious. I think I only made it to about half of the things on my list, but that's okay, half is better than none! So I've been compiling my list for this summer in my head. Here goes nothing...

1. Paint the door jams upstairs. This was on last summer's list. I really need to get this one done.

2. Get the last 4 years of video off the video camera, and transfer everything to dvd's. This shouldn't be too hard. JP just got a new big external drive that can hold everything while I work on it. Hmmm I guess I should look into DVD making programs. I want something easy to use. Is Imovie easy to use?

3. Plan and execute my second year of girls craft camp for Marlie's friends. We had a blast last year, I'm really looking forward to it this year.

4. Re-organize the big school/craft cabinet in the garage. I'm dreading this one...

So far that's it. I'm sure I'll add more as I think of them. Although, maybe if I don't add anything else, I run the chance of actually getting all 4 of these things done!

Reviving the garden

2011-05-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

Our garden is coming alive again! Last year we loosely followed the square foot gardening method and our garden grew like crazy. This year we decided to build 2 actual boxes to garden in, and try to follow the actual SFG method a little more closely. All of our gardening plans are intertwined with our Garden unit study that I bought from www.unitstudy.com

Marlie and Blake helped build the boxes, 4 feet long by 4 feet wide.

We staple gunned weed cloth to the bottoms of the boxes

Our dump has free compost, you just have to shovel it yourself :-) We mixed 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 compost to fill our boxes.

We had some leftover compost in the yard, and Marlie found lots of worms in it!

Mason wanted to help too, so we let him hammer the grids onto the boxes. We moved last years strawberry plants, to the new boxes. I hope they survive, they were looking a little sad, LOL.

Next up: planting, yay!!

Keeping preschoolers busy with crafts

2011-04-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

Last September I blogged about keeping preschoolers busy while homeschooling Since I haven't blogged about that in a while I thought I'd share something I recently made for Mason, a craft box. It sounds simple enough, but there's a few steps you can take to make it easier on yourself and your preschooler.

Mason loves doing crafts. But I hate having to drag everything out for him and he makes a huge mess. Last weekend I made him his very own craft box. I used a
Lakeshore Medium size classroom caddy to keep all of his stuff together. You could use something similar, that's lightweight and not huge. You want your preschooler to be able to carry it.

The key to a good preschool craftbox is not to put too much in it! If you give your child too many art supplies, they will make a giant mess, and inevitably won't want to clean it up :-) Mason's craft box has the following;

glue stick
roll of tape
1 hole punch
1 pair of blunt end scissors
1 craft punch (his happens to be a Christmas tree)
4 Tupperware stencils
2 sheets of stickers
1 sandwich bag of foam stickies
1 sandwich bag of paper cut into small shapes (for gluing)
5-6 pieces of colored construction paper
2 pencils (one colored)
4 markers
4 twistable colored pencils
17 crayons

Now you could throw it all in the box and hope for the best, but that's not how I roll, LOL. I like things neat, and when it's neat, it's way easier for kids to to their "work" (play of course!). I dug in our recycle bin, and found a few plastic bottles. I cut them in half, and used the bottom half to hold the supplies. We have one for crayons (a Lawry's marinade bottle), one of pencils and pens (a water bottle), and one for glue, scissors and the other tools (an Arm and Hammer bottle)

The result is everything stays together, ta da! Now it's totally fine to not give your kid every color of the rainbow in markers, or crayons. They really don't need all of them, all 96 crayons from a Big Box, would certainly end up on the floor! Besides, giving them different types of crayons, markers and pencils is a little more exciting than having all of one kind. I have fat markers, and thin, twistable crayons, and regular, regular pencils, and colored all in there at once.

I also have Tupperware stencils in his box, you could use any kind of stencil you have around. Mason also likes these old drafting stencils we have, with 20 different size circles on them. So get creative. I added 2 sheets of stickers, again anymore than that can get overwhelming to younger preschoolers. There are 2 small sandwich bags of things to glue. One is a bag of foam shapes. The other bag is random leftover scrapbook paper that I cut into small pieces. They are mostly triangles and squares. They are perfect for little hands, and the sandwich bag keeps them together.

Last is paper. I like colored construction paper, because it is sturdy enough to hold up to his heavy handed coloring and gluing. Computer paper is too thin. He tears it by accident and gets frustrated.

There you have it! A nicely organized craft box for your preschooler. And yes, this is a picture from *after* Mason has used it, he can clean it up all by himself :-)

My poor little neglected garden

2011-03-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

Last summer was a great growing season in our yard. Marlie and I planted our first square foot garden, and did very well with it. We still have tomatoes in the freezer! After summer passed, the chickens found the garden, and destroyed what was left growing in it. They dug up all of the woodchips around the garden, and flung them into the garden. They dug down far in the compost, and made themselves dirt bathing areas, LOL! It didn't bother me, I was too busy to care.

Now, it's spring, and I care that my garden is a mess! So I told Marlie no more chickens free-ranging, unless she's watching them. That solves the chickens in the garden problem. I'm also going to build boxes for my garden. Last year I just marked it off with bricks. It worked just fine, but I'm ready to have something a little more permanent. I'd love to go crazy and build a bunch of garden boxes, but I think 2 is about all I can manage taking care of.

Last summer was our first time with a garden and I learned a lot. I spent a bunch of money buying plants. I want a bigger garden this year, which would cost me more in plants. Last summer we tried planting seeds directly in the garden, and they didn't always come up. I was at Walmart and saw this little Jiffy Greenhouse for $6.00 and though we'd give it a try.

If you've gardened for any length of time, you probably already know all about these things, but if you're a newbie like me you've never seen one before. It came with 72 little peat moss "pots". You add water to them, and they expand like crazy. Then you plant the seeds in the moss and let them sprout inside. We only planted 7 different kinds of seeds, I wanted to start small.

Marlie stuck it on top of the computer cabinet, near the back door. It will get plenty of light, and hopefully we will have healthy plants growing in the next month. That should give me enough time to get my boxes ready!

My first free motion machined quilt!!!

2011-03-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

For Christmas my friend Lisa gave me a walking foot for my sewing machine. It didn't come with directions, which was kind of funny. It had all these pieces and we couldn't figure out how the thing worked!

A few months later, I determined to figure out how the walking foot worked. I looked on Youtube and discovered that they had send me a walking foot and a free motion quilting foot. That's why there were so many pieces! Oh yay, I had always wanted to free motion quilt. I found an awesome tutorial http://www.sewinspiredblog.com/2007/09/free-motion-machine-quilting-tutorial.html and got busy! I had been working on a quilt for a friend's first baby, so it was the perfect chance to try out my new skills. It turned out fantastic, I should have taken pictures of the upclose work. Maybe when the baby is born I'll snap a few :-)

Glasses and my mom heart

2011-02-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

Four weeks ago I went to the Sally Clarkson Mom Heart conference. It was a wonderful time of learning and I came home with renewed vigor in how I parent my children. Of course when things at home are sunshine and roses, everything you learn in a conference seems so easy to live out. When things are difficult, that's when you really learn about yourself and your children.

Marlie, Blake and I went to see the Wizard of Oz at the theatre downtown on a Wednesday night. Thursday morning Marlie couldn't find her glasses. I was really annoyed with her, she frequently doesn't put her things away and because of that, she looses things. I thought for sure the glasses were in the car or in her room. I told her that after her schoolwork was done, she wasn't allowed to do anything until those glasses were found. She spent the afternoon sniffling and fighting tears, while looking for the glasses.

By Saturday afternoon she still had not found the glasses and, my blood was boiling because I was sure those darn glasses were in her room somewhere. I spent several hours going through her room, with no luck. Marlie was weepy, sad that she lost her glasses, and upset because I was so angry with her. I spent another hour on the phone with the parking lot company, the security company, the restaurant near the theatre, and the theatre itself, trying to see if anyone turned in glasses. I even went as far as to drive us all downtown and walk around where we were, to see if she had dropped them.

During this whole time, everyone kept asking her where her glasses were. Every time I recounted the story of the lost glasses, I saw her countenance fall a little bit. I felt bad for her, but not that bad, I mean these weren't cheap glasses! They were Laura Ashley glasses, that we had only found at one store. It was going to be hundreds of dollars to replace them.

At some point during all of this, I called my friend Lisa. We had gone to the Mom Heart Conference together, I told her the whole story, then asked her,"What would Sally Clarkson do? I mean if this was one of her kids, what would she say to them?" I don't remember exactly what Lisa said, but it was pretty much *not* what I was doing or saying. I do remember Lisa telling me that Sally would probably just buy the kid new glasses, tell them to be more careful next time, and just move along with their life. Hrm, move along with my life huh? I halfway listened, because I knew she was right, but I didn't all the way listen, because I was still annoyed.

The following Wednesday we still hadn't found the glasses, so it was time to replace them. I told Marlie that we were going glasses shopping when Daddy came home. She breathed a little sigh, and her shoulders slumped, "Ok, mama" she said. Then a waterfall of tears started again, "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to loose them...." I told her it was okay, (but that wasn't how I felt on the inside).

That night she was very quiet in the car and so was I. I breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that I didn't have to bring all the kids shopping with me, but still dreading the trip. As we walked through the mall, it was like time stood still for me and I processed the entire week. I thought about how terrible this shopping trip must be for Marlie. I realized that I was practically torturing her with the memory of the stupid lost glasses. She had done everything she could to look for them, apologized over and over and I was still mad. I thought about how she was going to remember this week for the rest of her life. She was going to remember how I handled this. I didn't want her to remember that I was a jerk, and mean to her when she lost her glasses. I wanted her to remember that even though I was disappointed, that I loved her and helped her find a pair of glasses, even cuter than the first pair!

Just then we walked past the See's Candy shop, I grabbed her hand and pulled her inside. She looked at me a little confused. I said, "Pick whatever you want sweetie". She smiled at me and picked out a .70c lollipop. I bought the lollipop, and went back outside. As we walked hand-in-hand, Marlie's countenance began to lift. She started giggling and pointing to clothes in store windows that she liked. We eventually found our way to the glasses shop, where we laughed at some of the goofy looking glasses that she tried on. She didn't find any glasses that she liked, but it was okay. Our time was running out, so we headed back to the car. She squeezed my hand and latched herself to my side and said, "Thanks mama, this was really fun."

Oh, the guilt. I gave her a great big hug and told her I loved her. I told her was sorry that I was so angry about the glasses. I told her that I didn't ever want to hear her say how sorry she was for loosing her glasses again. I told her that we were going to find the cutest glasses, even cuter than the first pair.

My heart was ripped out and made better by my sweet little girl who only wanted to please, but that I wanted to punish with my anger. Silly, silly me. God wants me to love my girl with my Mom Heart, and raise her to be compassionate and caring. How will I ever do that if I don't show her that same kindness and compassion? They were glasses, just glasses. She was way more important to me than lost glasses.

Math is not for the faint of heart

2011-02-03T14:15:00.000-08:00

I despise math. There I said it, the homeschooling mom hates math. I think so much of my math hatred goes back to elementary school. We were not taught the why's of math, or what anything meant. We were just taught to memorize. I memorized how to divide, multiplication tables, measurements etc... So have all the info stored LOL, but I never understood why we did what we did with numbers. My wonderful mother sat with me for hours up on hours helping me with math. She was and still is, brilliant with math. She got me through high school math with decent grades.

I was not surprised when my Bryce started having trouble with math in 3rd grade. We muddled though by switching around curriculum, and using grandma as a tutor. He's 14 now, and has zero math trouble, which is wonderful!

Now Marlie, wonderful sweet Marlie does not have a math mind. She's even more of an artistic left brained kid than Bryce was. She had trouble with math from the first day of Kindergartn. She's 9 now, and has always had trouble with math. At the beginning of this school year she still couldn't add and subtract fluently. We've used most major math curriculums with zero success, Making Math Meaningful, Saxon, Abeka, Bob Jones, Horizons etc...

I switched her to Singapore Math out of sheer desperation in October. We had just had her tested by the math specialist at our homeschool program. The results were mixed. She was able to do most of the work, but she didn't seem to understand it. It also took her much longer than it should of to answer the questions, and she ended up in tears by the end of the test. The math specialist suggested Singapore Primary Mathematics. I reluctantly purchased another math curriculum. My plan was to give it a few weeks, and if there was no change, we had lined up a educational specialist to work with her.

To my absolute shock and amazement, with the first lesson everything changed. She seemed to completely understand what she was supposed to be doing. She laughed when I handed her a bunch of straws to help her understand place value, but then was intrigued by the pictures of bundles of straws in her textbook. Singapore math gives the student frequent opportunities to move from concrete manipulation to pictorial representation to abstract calculation. I think Marlie needed to move through that cycle over and over again, which Singapore does.

This week she learned how to multiply and divide numbers by 2. I've been dreading multiplication for the past few years. I knew she would have trouble with the concept, but with Singapore, she's zooming through the workbook, begging me to do more pages. She totally understands the concepts. It's not just memorized, like my knowledge was at her age, but completely sunk in, understanding. I'm not worried at all about her math skills, she's moving right along now, YAY Singapore Math!!

Overworked and underpaid

2011-01-22T10:12:00.001-08:00

I'm so tired. There has been at least one sick person in this house since December 20th. It started with Mason right before Christmas. Pertussis. Blah, such a bummer. The bigs had already had it and it was baaad. I knew exactly what the pertussis cough sounded like. Luckily I had called my homeopath a few months earlier, and stockpiled the remedies for pertussis, just in case. Mason bounced back really quick, he was only sick about 2 weeks.

Then Bryce started coughing, he coughed 3 weeks before it was diagnosed as a gnarly sinus infection. Meanwhile, Blake started coughing too, but his cough took a different turn. He spiked fevers of 103 and was pale and lethargic. Pneumonia. Ugh. 3 weeks, 2 different types of antibiotics, bloodwork, 2 sets of chest x-rays, 5 doctors visits. He was so sick. Slowly slowly he started feeling better. After 4 weeks of being sick the dr said to get him out and moving so went on a quick trip to the beach. There he had a episode of cold water urticaria. He went into anaphylactic shock, and swelling of the hands and feet.

Then last week I got sick. Thankfully the fever and nasty cough didn't last long, moms don't have time to be sick you know! It's a good thing I bounced back fast, because this weekend Marlie spiked a high fever and developed the nasty cough, oh and so did JP. But you know who feels great? The 3 year old of course!! Arg!

So I'm feeling a bit overworked. Everyone is sick, no one has energy to help do much of anything around here but me, and the messy 3 year old. That means lots of extra work for mom. It's times like these that I just have to turn on my favorite Phil Wickham Pandora Station and keep moving. If I sit for long and think about how grumpy I am that all I have done is care for sick people, I'm not a nice lady! But God knows my weaknesses, and he knows my frustrations.

Isa 40:29

He gives power to the weak, And to those who have no might He increases strength.

Works for me Wednesday!

2011-01-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

If you have little girls then you have hair stuff! A while back, I was finding hair ties (pony tail holders, whatever you call them) all over the house, in my car outside etc... It seemed like we were buying a new package every month or two, because they were all getting lost. It was driving me crazy to keep replacing hair stuff over and over. I saw a package of hair ties at the store that had a metal ring holding them together and I thought ah ha!

So I ran to the office supply store and picked up a package loose leaf rings. They were cheap, 9 of them for about 4.00. So now every single hair tie in the house that is on a ring. I keep the plain circle ones together and the hair ties with curlies and such on other rings. I even keep one in the car, in case of hair emergencies. After a few months I was amazed, that we had any hair stuff left, Marlie hadn't lost it! The rings keep everything together, no more lost hair stuff!

I have another system for keeping barrettes together, I'll talk about that next time... Find more great ideas Works for me Wednesday ideas at http://wearethatfamily.com/

Ahhh nice organized hair ties.

Even the curlies, and scrunchies work on the metal rings.

Christmas crafty #3

2010-12-23T23:38:00.000-08:00

So I stole this super cute gift idea from a teenage girl at the church craft fair, LOL! She made these amazingly cute headbands with flowers on them. I thought, I could do that, so I did :-)

The headbands are flat stretchy ones. Don't get rounded stretchy headbands or they will roll right off your head. I bought Goody brand, 6 for $2 something at WalMart. The black flower was 2.99, at Michael's and the others came in a nice size bunch with 7 or 8 for only 4.99 (plus I had a coupon!) at Joannes. Joannes was definitely a better deal.

I've always wondered how you get the underneath part of the flower to lay nice on the headband, and I've figured it out! You pull the flower off of the stem, then pop the bottom green portion off the underneath side. Then you are left with a tiny green stem and several layers of silk flower, which come apart super easy. Take all the layers of flower apart, then hot glue them back together, that will hold them nicely without the little green knobby part on the back. Then cut what's left of the green stem off with scissors. Then hot glue the headband to the flower. Cut a small oval piece of felt and glue it over the part of the head band that's glued to the flower and voila' instant cute headband. I made a bunch of them for Marlie and her cousins, for Christmas. They are going to look so cute. It was cheap and easy. I intended to put up pictures of how to actually make them, but I ran out of time. If anyone wants pics just let me know.

Oh, and check out my little helper, isn't he cute?

Christmas crafty #2

2010-12-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm a great stealer of craft ideas. I found this fantastic idea on the net for making coasters out of .16 cent Home Depot tiles and scrapbooking paper. Here's the site
http://www.stylemepretty.com/2009/03/30/diy-coasters/
Ours turned out really pretty! They took no time at all to make and so far everyone has loved them!

Christmas crafty #1

2010-12-13T08:51:00.001-08:00

I have been super busy with some really fun craft projects. Since I'm just a good copycat (meaning I swiped all of these ideas from the internet) I thought I'd share them.

**But if you are in my family, you might not want to read this until AFTER Christmas unless you don't want to be surprised, LOL!**

I've been sewing like a mad woman, making pot holders. I found a great tutorial here. http://www.aprettycoollife.com/2010/02/polka-dot-pot-holder.html I'ave been making mine a little different, doing things like only sewing 3 rows around, then making an "X" in the middle, and things like that. They've turned out really cute so far.

I paired my potholders with this reciper for M&M cookies in a jar
http://christmas.organizedhome.com/recipes/gifts-in-a-jar/m-and-m-cookies There are even cute printable tags with instructions on how to make the cookies, on this site.

The cookies in a jar looks super cute and was easy to make. After you pack everything in the jar, I cut matching fabric to tie on the lid. Add the pre made M&M tag, and I was finished!

Ta-da! A potholder and cookies!

My Christmas sewing and crafting takes up a lot of space. My dining room table has been covered in fabric for weeks now. Everyone's been eating dinner at the bar again. With December 25th quickly approaching, I'm spending every spare second sewing.

Are you ready to have children?

2010-12-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Are you ready to have children? I read this on a forum and it cracked me up! I just had to share it.

Lesson 1

1. Go to the grocery store.
2. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.
3. Go home.
4. Pick up the newspaper.
5. Read it for the last time.

Lesson 2

Before you finally go ahead and have children, find a couple who already are parents and berate them about their...1. Methods of discipline.2. Lack of patience.3. Appallingly low tolerance levels.4. Allowing their children to run wild.5. Suggest ways in which they might improve their child's breast feeding, sleep habits, toilet training, table manners, and overall behavior. Enjoy it because it will be the last time in your life you will have all the answers.

Lesson 3

A really good way to discover how the nights might feel...
1. Get home from work and immediately begin walking around the living room from 5PM to 10PM carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 8-12 pounds, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playing loudly. (Eat cold food with one hand for dinner)

2. At 10PM, put the bag gently down, set the alarm for midnight, and go to sleep.

3. Get up at 12 and walk around the living room again, with the bag, until 1AM.

4. Set the alarm for 3AM.

5. As you can't get back to sleep, get up at 2AM and make a drink and watch an infomercial.

6. Go to bed at 2:45AM.

7. Get up at 3AM when the alarm goes off.

8. Sing songs quietly in the dark until 4AM.

9. Get up. Make breakfast. Get ready for work and go to work (work hard and be productive)Repeat steps 1-9 each night. Keep this up for 3-5 years. Look cheerful and together.

Lesson 4

Can you stand the mess children make? To find out...
1. Smear peanut butter onto the sofa and jam onto the curtains.

2. Hide a piece of raw chicken behind the stereo and leave it there all summer.

3. Stick your fingers in the flower bed.

4. Then rub them on the clean walls.

5. Take your favourite book, photo album, etc. Wreck it.

6. Spill milk on your new pillows. Cover the stains with crayons. How does that look?

Lesson 5

Dressing small children is not as easy as it seems.
1. Buy an octopus and a small bag made out of loose mesh.

2. Attempt to put the octopus into the bag so that none of the arms hang out.

Time allowed for this - all morning.

Lesson 6

Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don't think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don't look like that.
1. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there.

2. Get a dime. Stick it in the CD player.

3. Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat. Sprinkle cheerios all over the floor, then smash them with your foot.

4. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.

Lesson 7

1. Go to the local grocery store.
2. Take with you the closest thing you can find to a pre-school child. (A full-grown goat is an excellent choice). If you intend to have more than one child, then definitely take more than one goat.
3. Buy your week's groceries without letting the goats out of your sight.
4. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.
5. Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children.

Lesson 8

1. Hollow out a melon.
2. Make a small hole in the side.
3. Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from side to side.
4. Now get a bowl of soggy Cheerios and attempt to spoon them into the swaying melon by pretending to be an airplane.
5. Continue until half the Cheerios are gone.
6. Tip half into your lap. The other half, just throw up in the air.You are now ready to feed a nine- month-old baby.

Lesson 9

1.Learn the names of every character from Sesame Street , Barney, Disney, the Teletubbies, and Pokemon. 2.Watch nothing else on TV but PBS, the Disney channel or Noggin for at least five years. (I know, you're thinking What's 'Noggin'?) Exactly the point.

Lesson 10

1.Make a recording of Fran Drescher saying 'mommy' repeatedly. (Important: no more than a four second delay between each 'mommy'; occasional crescendo to the level of a supersonic jet is required).
2. Play this tape in your car everywhere you go for the next four years.
3. You are now ready to take a long trip with a toddler.

Lesson 11

1. Start talking to an adult of your choice.
2. Have someone else continually tug on your skirt hem, shirt- sleeve, or elbow while playing the 'mommy' tape made from Lesson 10 above.
3. You are now ready to have a conversation with an adult while there is a child in the room.

I laughed so hard when I read this one! Especially the part about dragging a rake across the car. Marlie dragged a rock across the side of my car in the Del Mar Fairgrounds parking lot when she was little. Oh the joys...

The costume shop is closed!

2010-11-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

I love sewing Halloween costumes! I have such fond memories of my mom sewing me costumes every year. I was a clown, a red crayon, a bride, and various other things through my elementary school years. Maybe that's why I love love love sewing costumes for my own kids.

This year Marlie really wanted to do a "theme". She wanted the boys to dress up with her theme too, but they refused, LOL. Sooooo it was just Mason, Marlie and I that dressed as the Scooby gang! I made the Scooby costume, and a Daphne costume for Marlie. I found the horrible orange sweater and red cheerleader skirt at the thrift store for 3.95 each so I went as Velma! I also sewed Charlie Brown, and his sister Sally costumes, a ballerina, and repaired a Spiderman costume, for my friends kids. It was a great sewing holiday, costumes are my favorite. In the back of my mind I kept thinking that the big sewing holiday is coming up quickly... CHRISTMAS!!! Eeek!

Over-commitment

2010-10-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

It's been a rough week. It's week, I don't know, of homeschooling. 7? 6? Somewhere around there. I've realized that I over committed. I over committed myself and the kids to too many things. I'm stressed, and cranky. They are stressed and cranky too.

Of course everyone likes what they are doing, (Except the teenager, he doesn't like anything, but that's a whole different post for another day). Marlie loves her 2 dance classes, and piano. Blake loves piano and guitar. Everyone loves their school classes, youth group and church nights etc... I love my small group, my playgroup, my 3 dance classes. But boy oh boy, did I over do it. I drove over 60 miles in one day. One day! It wasn't even errands, just pick ups and drop offs from school, church and activities :-(.

Part of my new found stress is being the mother of a high schooler, who is in school. I know it's the right decision for us, for where we are in our lives. But drop offs and picks ups are a PITB, no lie. With 1 kid at one school, and 2 kids at another for full-day classes, my afternoons are full of driving, blah. The other stuff, I did to myself, I committed to too many things. Of course everything is already paid for, and I"m not going to waste the money, so for now I'll stick everything out. But come a few weeks from now, things will a be a little less crazy.

I think a lot of us mothers do this to ourselves, we over commit then wonder why we are so cranky. We wonder why we are grouchy with the kids, or snappy with our husband. Even though I've had 4 kids for nearly 3 years, I sometimes feel like I'm still learning how to manage 4. I need chill time (which for me is dance). I need time to read my Bible and pray. I need time with my husband. I need time with my kids (that isn't me throwing food at them while we load up the car). I can't seem to manage a ton of preplanned things without crashing. I do much better with spontaneity. So for now, until the craziness subsides and I can drop a few activities, I'll do my best to be nice, and not cranky. My verse for the next few weeks is;

Exodus 33:14 And He said, "My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest."

Beauty with a promise

2010-10-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

We've had such a crazy weather week. Monday was 110 degrees! It was completely unexpected, the week prior was chilly, and we were wearing pants. It was so hot, that one of our chickens died :-( Marlie was so sad, and I felt terrible. The rest of the week was humid, humid, humid. It rained on and off Thursday with amazing lightning and thunder storms. By the later evening the sky was filled with a mass of colorful clouds, and the most beautiful double rainbow I've ever seen.

I wish I had a wide angle lense, because you could see the full arch of one of the rainbows. It was amazing! Everytime I see a rainbow, I can't help but sing that little Bible song in my head about rainbows, "Rainbows over you, God's blessed love, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet." Such an beautiful sight.

Better late than never, right?

2010-09-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

I know, I know it's nearly week 4 of school. But I still really want to post about our first week. So pretend that it's not the weekend before week 4, okay?

Everyone's first day of school was Tuesday September 7th. It was a bittersweet day, as it was Bryce's first day of high school. I was super excited for him, but sad at the same time. I knew that sending him to high school was the right choice for our family, but that morning I felt a huge sadness. No more pajama school mornings, no more spur of the moment trips to the beach, no more hollering at him to quit playing the drums and get some schoolwork done. JP was driving him to school tha tmorning, and as we walked them out to the car I had to fight the urge to cry like a baby. I snapped a picture and off they went. As soon as they drove away, the tears fell. Oh, what a momentous day.

I homeschooled Bryce for 9 years. That means I spent 1,620 days pouring my time into him. I taught him how to read. The first word he ever read was ".com", LOL. I taught him how to add using his Rescue Heros. We made a train out of chairs and added and subtracted Rescue Heros, from the train to learn math facts. He hated handwriting, and had terrible handwriting for many years. His favorite books in 2nd grade were, "A Cricket in Times Square" and "My Fathers Dragon". I spent 4-5 hours per day, when he was in 4th grade doing Neurodevelopmental program with him, trying to get his processing and sensory issues under control. In 7th grade we collected bugs from the backyard. After stuffing them into the "killing jar" we made, we painstakingly identified each one and pinned them down. I have such fond memories of our homeschooling adventures.

So I sniffled a bit, pulled myself together and started on another year of memory making and learning with the ones still at home. "Not Back to School" week was calling us. There were museums to visit, donuts to be eaten, dogs at the pet store to walk, beaches to visit, and Shamu was waiting...

Blast from the past

2010-09-10T10:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine. She is recently starting to blog, and asked me if I wanted to see her blog. As we were looking at it, I admired the very cool play on words but still spiritual, title to her blog. I laughed and said, that my blog title really did have a meaning and I gave her the short version of my "How Did I Get Here" classic Costco story. She suggested that I repost it. So in honor of L, here it is...

Friday, February 1, 2008
How did I get here...It is a question I sometimes ask myself. Yesterday was a classic "How did I get here?" moment.

Costco, the epitome of shopping. Unfortunately for me, Costco is a mere 2 miles away. I go way too often. Anyway, yesterday was the first time I took all 4 kids to Costco. Blake was my "list guy", he kept reading me the shopping list, while Bryce and Marlie grabbed the stuff and tossed it all in the cart. Mason was totally zonked in the sling. My cart was super full, and I mean crazy super full. So get to the checkout lane and, ummm wow, I spent over $200? Ack, ok, now not all of what I bought will fit back into my one cart, so they go get me another one. By this time my back is hurting from carrying Mason in the sling for so long. He's all slumped up in a ball, still sleeping, and the weight is killing me. There's no way I can push one cart and pull the other, so Bryce offers to push one.

So off we go toward the parking lot. The Sprite Blake and Marlie drank while we were at the food court is starting to kick in and they are literally pinging off the two carts. I'm trying to get everyone thru the Costco parking lot without getting run over (people drive so fast thru there!). Of course I had to park crazy far away, up a bit of an incline. Blake is still zipping around high on Sprite, and Bryce snaps at him, something about calming down. Now we've had issues with Bryce trying to "be in charge" of Blake, so instead of a gentle reminder (I'm the mom, you're the brother blah blah blah), I spout off, "Bryce stop acting like an adult". Nice huh?

Just then I can't possibly push my cart anymore and have to stop for a second. I turned around to see 2 little old ladies following right after my parade, with their carts. They both frown at me, then try to get around all of us. I apologize for blocking the way, but I simply can't push the cart any further. The baby starts waking up and Blake and Marlie are still acting like a bunch of fruitcakes high on Sprite. And here I am, stuck in the middle of the Costco parking lot with my crying baby, bossy 11 year old, the fruitcake twins and 2 carts thinking, "How did I get here?? How exactly did I get to this point in my life?"

I have no answers, just a picture of the bossy 11 year old and the crying baby, when they aren't being bossy and crying :-)

Awww aren't they cute? Bryce is 14 now, and Mason is 2 years 10 months. I'd like to say that things have calmed down and I don't have any "How Did I Get Here" moments, but ha, no such luck. I probably have more now than ever before...

Homeschooling with toddlers and preschoolers

2010-09-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

If anyone ever tells you that homeschooling with a toddler or preschool is easy, they either have a calm little girl that sits quietly and colors all day, or they are a big fat liar, LOL! Marlie was pretty chill, she was the little girl that sat quietly much of the time and colored and did crafts all day. Mason is not that child! No matter what kind of toddler or preschooler you have, homeschooling with little ones takes planning. You can't just wing it ever day, if you do, you'll end up with a crying mama and a screaming toddler (or a screaming mama and a crying toddler!)

Yes, you really need a plan for how you are going to manage the little ones. I keep a bunch of toys and crafts that are *only for school time*. The newness is key. If you keep some toys and activities separate from every day toys, they will keep the kids occupied for a longer period of time. So here's how I do it. I sit down with my toys and activities and make 2 lists. 1 - art and crafty type things, and 2 - toys and other activities. If you don't make a list, when you are trying to think of something for little jr to do, instead of color on the walls, you often panic and can't think of anything for him to do (or at least that's what happens to me!) Here's part of my 2 lists (my full lists are much longer)

1. markers
2. play-doh
3. color wonder
4. aqua doodle
5. white board

1. light bright
2. puzzles
3. abc blocks
4. Little People
5. legos

Once the list is done, I print out an online calendar and plug everything in. I plan 1 art activity, and 2 regular activity's per day. I'm not married to the schedule in any way, if Mason wants to play with play-doh, I'm not going to tell him he can only have markers. But I have to have some sort of plan or I get all flustered when he's whining about being bored, and someone else needs my help. This is my September plan. It's hanging on the side of a cabinet right near where we will be doing school so I can see it. It's an easy month, not a lot of messy art projects, and the activities I planned aren't anything I have to prep for. Wednesday the big kids have classes all day, so it's just Mason and I. We have playgroup that day, so I don't plan for that day.

As far as other activities goes, I keep a huge list on my computer of things for siblings to do while the older kids are homeschooling. Here it is in it's massiveness, LOL

Give them a pipe cleaners and a little bag of beads. Let them string the beads on the pipe cleaners. When they are done, make a little circle out of it, twist and trim the ends and you’ve got a bracelet.
Little notebook and either the stickers or the stamp and some colored pencils.
Lined paper and envelopes, tell them to write Daddy a note
Plastic (or cardboard) coins and a piggy bank- bought or home-made.(Pringles can, slit cut in top)
Playdoh with a plastic knife, rolling pin, cookie cutters, small plastic toys, etc.
Painting; watercolors, paint books, or food coloring in water with a Q-tip.
Chalk or light color crayons on dark construction paper.
Sscissors and paper (no other objective in mind!)
Easy-to-use paper punch and strips of paper.
Stencils, paper, colored pencils.
Lacing cards; Cardboard shape with holes punched around it.
Attach yarn,wrap masking tape around the end.
Plastic canvas with yarn attached, wrap end in masking tape.
Poke holes in thick cardboard with a tack.(Just be sure you know where the tack ends up!)
Shallow bucket on a towel on the floor add water, boats Plastic fish,measuring cups, etc.
Writing tray; Put a layer of rice or cornmeal in a cookie sheet. Good for spelling practice or picture-drawing or practicing A B C?s.
Mini-sandbox; Put a layer of sand in a box the size of a banana box. Add trucks, cars, Popsicle sticks.
Make a tunnel of kitchen chairs.
Give them a crochet hook and a length of yarn. Demonstrate chain stitch afew times. if you refuse to do it for them,you'll be surprised at what they figure out.
Stack cups or containers of different sizes.
Nuts and bolts, same or different sizes.
Scrap wood, hammer, nails.
Bucket of water and a paintbrush-for outside painting. Works best on wood or concrete.
Chalk on sidewalk or steps.
Let them "wash" a few plastic dishes. Put an egg beater, measuring cup and baster in the water.
A cup with non-toxic soapy water and a straw to blow bubbles. You may put it on a sheet of paper and add food coloring to the water.
A retractable measuring tape to measure with.
Arrange blocks by size, color, or shape.
Make a necklace or snack chain with yarn (masking tape on end) and any cereal with holes; Fruit loops, Cheerios, etc.
Dip string pieces in thinned poster paint. Fold a paper in half. Lay string on one side and fold over to create designs.
Flash cards; ABC?s or what ever you may have.
Pictures with colored glue. If you put these on a smooth plastic sheet, it can be peeled off when dry.
Super ball or small car and a paper towel or Christmas paper tube.
Draw roads, houses, etc. on large paper or cardboard. Use cars and trucks on it.
Tops- bought or made with ½ toothpick and cardboard disk.
Look through the button box.
Water colored with food coloring, eye dropper or paint brush, coffee filter. Once this is dry, you can iron it. Then cut the center out of a paper plate. Glue filter to it for a sun catcher.
Beanbags and a bucket.
Magnet and paperclips, washers, a nail, etc.
A large box. (yep, that's all!)
Throw a blanket over a card table or a couple of chairs. Offer clothespins.
Glue and glitter pictures...get them into old clothes and onto a plastic drop cloth or old sheet first though.
A variety of magnets and the refrigerator door.
Stickie notes and a pencil.
Refrigerated cookie dough and a cookie sheet...they can play-dough the stuff into balls and you can all eat the results.
Tattooing...give them watercolor markers, get them into an old pair of shorts and let them do the body-paint thing.
A stack of puzzles.
Ice trays and buttons, beads or marbles for sorting.
A marble maze - set it in a large cookie sheet or a shallow box to cut down on the lost marbles.
A plastic bottle (clean milk jug, well rinsed detergent bottle, etc.)and items such as clothes pin, straw, penny, etc., to drop in and then shakeout again.
Ice cube on a sidewalk. Works like sidewalk chalk, but requires no cleaning.
Damp washrag and a dirty wall or a window, paper towels and a spray bottle with a little water in it.
Colored rice to pour through a colander or funnels.
Colored rice or colorful cereals to glue on paper - write the child's name in big block letters and let them glue stuff inside the letters.
Tape a sheet of freezer paper or newsprint to the floor and trace around the child (have them lie still on it with their arms and legs a little outstretched) and then let them color their self portrait.
Single hole punch and a ruler
Lakeshore’s Do a Dot Markers
Tape and paper, (I buy tape at the 99 cent store and showed her how to use it sparingly.
Metallic or Glitter Crayola crayons

A few other helpful tips for homeschooling with toddlers and preschoolers...

Assign each older child 20 minutes to play with the little one. With 3 older kids that worked out to 60 minutes that Mason was occupied. It gave me a chance to work 1 on 1 with a big kid while Mason was busy.

Be open to schooling in different places. I can't even count how many times, we've tossed all the school work in backpacks and headed to the park. The big kids worked under the shade of a tree on a blanket, while Mason played.

Use nap time! I often had the older kids do their independent work while Mason was awake, and then we did things that needed more of my attention while he was sleeping.

Start early end early. There's nothing worse than getting a late start on school and being stuck still working at 3:00. By then your toddlers and preschoolers are totally done, LOL! I know you late sleepers will shudder, but I have my kids starting on school at 8:00. If they are up and ready earlier, then they know to start earlier. Blake usually starts by 7:30. To his credit he's been finished by 12:00 quite frequently! If you put your kids to bed earlier, then they will get up earlier ;-)

Hope that helps all the homeschooling mamas with littles!

School in the garage

2010-09-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

Homeschoooling last year was tough. This house is awesome, and we love it, but it doesn't really have a great space to do school in, while Mason plays. Our dining room is really small, and the other rooms are just average size. We made it work, but it was challenging.

Long story short, I decided to make our garage our school room. The garage is affectionately known as the "youth room". We have a Foosball table, 2 gaming systems, more crafts and beads than we'll ever be able to use in our lifetimes, and a music corner. It was pretty organized already, but there was a bunch of clutter that had accumulated that needed to be cleaned out. I also had the daunting task of cleaning out the huge ikea shelf and switching the school closet with the huge game shelf. I wish I had taken "before" pictures... TaDa! Here's after

Foosball table is on the left, chest freezer on the right You can see the Game Cube cabinet, the Wii cabinet is out of the picture in the back left corner.

My gf gave me these 2 carpets for free! They will be a perfect place for Mason to play, paint, do playdoh, etc... while the big kids work. He's also really good about staying in the front yard, so I'll probably open the garage door a lot so he can play outside during schooltime. I'd like to get a few beanbags so we have some cozy spaces to read. Now that my computer is back up and working, I'm going to print out a timeline to put on the garage door.

With only 2 kids at home to school this year, the craft area doubles perfectly as a school space. I took the garage school idea from my friends Laura and Holly. They have individual Ikea tables in their garages for the kids to work at. If I didn't already have this counter top, I would have done the same thing. I sewed the curtains on the sides and top from a full size sheet that I bought for 3.99 at Walmart. Behind the curtain (and in the cabinet) on the right is all of my mother-in-law's beads. The middle is full of my sewing things, and some art supplies. The right is full of office supplies. Everything is super organized now, but I felt overwhelmed by stuff when I looked at it, so I decided to cover it.

Everything pretty much looks like this... under the curtains. It took me a while to get it all this organized. But I'm tired of "I can't find a marker" "I need the stapler" etc... So it's all neatly put away and labeled, no more excuses!

My beloved Ikea shelf. This is a workhorse of a shelf. We used it for school in our old house, and when we moved, we put it in the garage for games. Now that we are doing school in the garage, the shelf is back to school duty, while the closet in the house is now on game duty. I'm trying to use every little space I can, to my advantage. So you see the wall on the left? I used push pins to hang up my Classical Conversations cards.

All of Mason's games, puzzles, etc... fit in here too. I scoured garage sales and used curriculum sales all summer long, trying to find new stuff to occupy him with. These toys are only for school time. I usually make up a schedule of sorts, of things that I set up for him to play with. I"m not inflexible on the schedule. I just get frazzled when he's whining and I need him busy. At that very moment I can't often think of what to set out for him, so a schedule helps me stay on track.

Along with cubbies for each school age child, and cubbies for Mason's toys I have cubbies for me. I keep all my teachers manuals, resource books, and such all together. It makes everything much easier when I can just grab what book I need and go.

So there is is! My new school space, I"m super excited, it's going to work great for us.

T-13 days

2010-08-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

School starts for us in 13 days. I'm excited and dreading it all at the same time! Bryce will be starting 9th grade at The Met high school http://sandiegomet.webs.com/ We are thrilled that he was blessed with a space in this high school. They are all about internship, responsibility, and college college, college. He's really excited about interviewing for an internship in October. JP will be able to drop him off everyday, and I"ll have to pick him up. It will be strange to have to pick up a kid from school every day. I've been totally spoiled to not ever have to do that!

We will be homeschooling Blake and Marlie with Dehesa charter school this year. Blake will have full day classes Mon. and Wed. Marlie has a full day of classes on Wed. I'm not 100% decided on everything that we are using but I have 95% decided.

~*~Marlie~*~

Making Math Meaningful 2 (finish) and MMM 3 or Math U See 3

Handwriting Without Tears Cursive (started last year)

Explode the Code book 6 and 7

Bob Jones Spelling 3 and Spelling City

Maps Charts and Graphs C

First Language Lessons 3

Apologia Bible "Who Is God"

Apologia Science "Exploring Creation with Astronomy"

Logic Countdown

Various reading books with Veritas Press Baby Island and Boxcar Children Comprehension guides

I haven't decided about History yet. I'm waiting to see what Blake's History class is studying

~*~Blake~*~

Logic Countdown

Maps Charts and Graphs F

Spelling Workout 6

Life Of Fred Fractions

Teaching Texbooks 6

Explain it Math Questions

Typing Instructor

Apologia Science "Exploring Creation with Astronomy"

Apologia Bible "Who Is God"

Daily Grams 6

Writing With Ease ??

Various reading books with Veritas Comprehsion Guides

I'm still not sure about History

It may seem like a lot, but they don't do everything every single day. Things like Explode the Code, Maps Charts and Graphs etc... I usually schedule 1-2 days a week.

And now for Mason. I've been working the past few weeks, cleaning out our garage to use it for school. We always have it set up as a kid hang out room, but it did have a bunch of extra stuff in there that took up space and wasn't necessary. I bought a bunch of new toys and manipulatives at garage sales over the summer, to keep him busy. I have 2 carpets for the ground (they were free!) That will give him a place to play with toys. I'm planning to put his Ikea table and chairs in there to give him a place to play playdoh and do crafts. Now if the weather would please cooperate so it's not in the 100's, we could actually do school in there, LOL! I'm not quite done with the clean out, so in a few days when I'm done, I'll post some pictures.

So there we go, school 2010-2011, here we come!!!!!!!!!!!

Summer to-do list

2010-07-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

So here's my original summer to do list. I'm glad I typed it out in June, because there are things on here I forgot that I wanted to do, LOL!

1. Clean out school closet, put away all books in proper grade bin in garage
Done! But now Mason's toys have takes over the school closet. I'm going to have to think of a place to put his stuff.

2. Re-paint door jams in hallway (yes I'm a copycat)
Totally forgot about wanting to do this. That's not a good sign.

3. Plan and execute girls crafty weeklong day camp for Marlie's friends. I already have it halfway planned...
Done! It was wonderful and exhausting.

4. Have Marlie finish the quilt we started last summer (oops!)
Haven't even found the quilt yet...

5. Sew Marlie few "Laura Ingalls" type dresses. She's been bugging me for months.
I just need to finish the neckline and hat.

6. Finish building the run for my chickens (actually this needs to get done in the next week or so)
Still not done, but it's on my to-do list after the dresses are done.

7. Plan and actually go through with 2 scrapbooking nights a month with my gf's.
((sigh)) nope, haven't done this yet either. Darn!

8. Yes it's a lofty notion, but high on my list for this summer is to see if I can't teach myself to play the flute. We have 2 flutes that belonged to JP's dad. I found a great teach yourself type book. I'm hoping I can muddle through it.

Well I can blow through the mouth piece and make a nice clear sound but that's about it.

I added two things to my list...

I made curtains for Marlie's room, they are already done :-)

I want to make valances for my living room. This project will have to come after the other big ones are done.

Craft Camp Recap

2010-07-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

So craft camp came and went. Day 1 was awesome. Day 2 -5 were fantastic, but I was so tired! There was no way I was blogging about it, LOL! The girls and I had so much fun.

Days 2-5 we made rock necklaces, tie-dye shirts, yarn octopi, sewed purses, and doll quilts, and cooked monkey bread.

They moved so quickly through the sewing projects that I had to create another! Wednesday-Friday they made doll quilts. I was so pleased with how quickly they learned to handle the swing machines, and to sew straight stitches. The downside to adding another sewing project was that we didn't get to cook W-F. We were so busy trying to finish sewing that I couldn't fit it in. No one seemed to mind though.

On Friday only 5 of my girls were there, 3 had left on vacation. They were so proud of their quilts (and the yarn octopus, LOL!) It was a great week. All of them asked me if we could do it again, maybe next summer ;-)

Craft camp days 2-5

2010-07-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

Craft Camp - Day 1

2010-07-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

Today was day 1 of my week long Girls Craft Camp. We had 8 girls from ages 7-11 over for a fantastic day of crafts and fun. The girls arrived at 9:50 ready to go. The house was all a buzz with excitement. Our first hour and a half is set aside for sewing. I wanted something they could finish in one day, so we made rice ice packs. None of the girls, except Marlie had any experience sewing. I was so thankful that my mom was here to help. She's taught elementary school kids sewing for years and years. The girls did a great job with the rice packs, far better than I thought they would. We had a few "race car driver", type sewers, LOL, but for the most part they did well.

For cooking we made pudding cones. I found the recipe in an old Family Fun Magazine.

1 box instant pudding mix
1 ziplock bag
2 cups cold milk
Ice cream cones
sprinkles

Empty pudding mix into ziplock bag.
Add milk.
Seal the bag, then sqeeze, knead, and shake for 8 minutes or until the contents are thickened.
Place bag in refrigerator to set.
To serve, cut off one corner of the bag and squeeze into ice cream cones.
Top with sprinkles.

The girls made the pudding, then while it set in the refrigerator they ate lunch.
After lunch we put the cones together, and they inhaled them even quicker than they made them!

After lunch and pudding cones we painted ceramic animals, then drew pictures while I read a bit of "A Hundred Dresses".

OUr first day was fantastic! I can't wait for tomorrow, and hopefully I'll remember to take pictures :-)

June!

2010-06-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

It's crazy to think that June is nearly over! We've had so many things happen this month. The most exciting is that JP was offered a full-time job at our church! He's a part of the director/pastoral staff and will be running the local community outreaches. We are so excited! He starts July 1st.

Then our Blake turned 11! I can't believe he is in middle school! He wanted to go to Legoland instead of have a party, so Dad took him to Legoland one Monday. School was still in session, so Legoland was empty!

He choose cheese burgers and fries for dinner at Nana's house. My mom bought him this ball that bounces 125 feet in the air. So everyone came outside to play with it.

Marlie had her dance recital at the Casa Del Prado theatre!

We took a trip to Magic Mountain with the kids. They had earned free tickets with MM's reading program. It was our "Yay you've graduated day!" We now have a 9th grader (yikes!), 6th grader and a 3rd grader + plus Mason.

My garden is growing bigger day by day. It looks sort of piddly still, but soon the lettuce, strawberries, zuccini, bell peppers, tomatos, etc... will be ready for harvest. We are using the square foot gardening method (Next time I'll use the grid). It's been so easy, it needs a blog post of it's own.

Last but not least, JP took on the incredible task of rebuilding our backyard fence. It's day 3, and he's halfway done! It will be so nice to have a tall fence that isn't falling down. Thank heaven our neighboors agreed to pay for their halves of the materials!

Summer's on it's way

2010-06-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

Oh how I love you summer time! Summer is a homeschooling moms best friend. It's when we get all of our big projects done. Or at least that's what my mommy taught me, LOL! I wasn't homeschooled, but my siblings (who are much younger than I am) were. Summer was when she tackled big stuff, like the year she painted the hallway, and all the hallway doors, or like the year she painted the bathroom. Hmm come to think of it I think all her big projects revolved around painting... But with 5 kids there was plenty that needed re-painting.

So it's my summer, the summer of 2010. I have a tentative list of what projects, large and small, I'd like to get done. If I can check off even just a few I'll be super happy.

1. Clean out school closet, put away all books in proper grade bin in garage

2. Re-paint door jams in hallway (yes I'm a copycat)

3. Plan and execute girls crafty weeklong day camp for Marlie's friends. I already have it halfway planned...

4. Have Marlie finish the quilt we started last summer (oops!)

5. Sew Marlie few "Laura Ingalls" type dresses. She's been bugging me for months.

6. Finish building the run for my chickens (actually this needs to get done in the next week or so)

7. Plan and actually go through with 2 scrapbooking nights a month with my gf's.

8. Yes it's a lofty notion, but high on my list for this summer is to see if I can't teach myself to play the flute. We have 2 flutes that belonged to JP's dad. I found a great teach yourself type book. I'm hoping I can muddle through it.

For now that's everything, but I'm certain I'll come up with a few more items for this list. Of course on top of all of this I can't wait to take the kids to the beach, several times a week and just sit there and watch the waves crash and my awesome kiddos play.

Living it up in a $25 dollar doghouse!

2010-05-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

What does a $25 dollar dog house + 1 weeks worth of afternoons + 2 Home Depot trips = ??

One fantastic chicken coop!!!

It's been a looong week. My arms are tired and my house is a mess, but it's done! Marlie, Blake, Mason and I worked all week getting the coop ready for our 5 week old chicks. We started by painting the inside white. The wood inside the coop was unfinished, so we dug around in the shed for some leftover house paint. After the inside was painted, we cut and installed the roost bar. I found JP's jigsaw in the shed and used it to cut 2 ventilation holes and a pop door. The pop door will lead to the run that I'm building next week. Then we drilled vent holes all the way around the sides and back of the coop. Attaching the hardware cloth to the front took the longest, my arms were really tired! It was a lot of screws. After adding the front clean out door, and the pop door we introduced our girls to their new house! They seem to like it, and hopped right up to the roost bar.

Now to power clean the house so I can build the run next week!

Roosters for sale!

2010-05-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

Or really for free, LOL! It's time to give the beloved roosters away. I'm kind of bummed, a few of the roosters were my favorite from the beginning! But 14 chicks in the garage is getting stinky, and they are about ready to go outside in the coop (that I haven't finished yet...)

Here's the Turken, he's definitely a rooster!

Mason really likes watching the chickens run in the grass.

This one is a hen, we may keep her.

This Rhode Island Red is a rooster too!

And we grow!!

2010-05-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

Our chicks are getting bigger and bigger. They are 2 weeks old today. their wing feathers are getting nice and long, soon they won't have to have a heat lamp on their brooder 24/7.

Yesterday was nice and warm, so we decided to let them play outside. (scroll to the bottom of the page to mute the music)

Growing feathers and starting a coop

2010-05-02T09:48:00.001-07:00

Here's the beginnings of my chicken coop. It's a doghouse that I bought on Craigslist. It has a nice shingled roof, but it's so heavy that I'm waiting to have JP put in back on until the coop is done.

This chick is so cute! When it hatched we noticed that it didn't have any hair on his neck. I thought maybe he was sick and would die. Turns out, it's a Naked Neck Turken, which is just a different breed of chicken. He looks like a little old man. Marlie is particularly fond on this guy and named him special.

Here's our babies! They are one week old in this picture. This is 13 of them, Marlie was holding one when I took the picture. They are getting to big for this box, I'll need to move them very soon.

Their wing feathers are starting to grow in, and they are so cute! This little one will probably be black and white speckled.

Chicks chicks everywhere!

2010-04-28T09:57:00.001-07:00

Our chicks are growing so fast! They will need a second brooder very soon. I've been offering foster chick opportunitys to friends, but no one has taken me up on the offer. They are so much fun to hold and play with. The black ones are very mellow, they will sit still and snuggle up to you. The rest freak out for a few seconds when you try to hold them, hopefully they will settle down in the next few weeks. We will probably keep them for 2-3 more weeks until we can tell if they are hens or roosters. Then we will pick our favorite 4,

and give the rest away.

The chicks are here!

2010-04-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

On Friday we were very busy getting ready to host the appetizer portion of a middle school progressive dinner. At about 4:00pm I ran upstairs to get something, and low and behold there was a chick in the incubator! I was so surprised. We had read that after pipping, it could be up to 24 hours before the chicks hatched, so we weren't counting on any chicks for many hours. Within an hour, we had 2 chicks. The kids were so excited, and so was I. All our diligent work had paid off!

By 11:oo Friday night 6 chicks had hatched! I kept trying to get a video of one hatching, but it seemed to take them so long to zip their shell, that when they finally came out I had given up watching! It took several tries and it's blurry from looking through the window on the incubator, but here is chick #6 hatching

Day 21 of chicken hatching

2010-04-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

Today is day 21 of our chicken hatching project! We woke to the sounds of cheeping and peeping coming from our incubator. It was so exciting to hear them through the shell. The kids and I took turns running upstairs every 1/2 hour, to check for progress. Although most chickens hatch on day 21, it's sort of like pregnancy, they can come a little early or late.

At about 3:00pm I was upstairs sneaking a peek in the incubator, wondering if anything had happened yet, and I saw that one egg had pipped! I called the kids up to see they were so excited!

Because I have tons of free time...

2010-04-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

Because we have so much free time on our hands (not!) I decided that this was the spring to try a project I've always wanted to do with the kids, hatching chicken eggs!

A friend of mine said she had an incubator that she would let us borrow. That was the biggest expense right there! I was so excited that she let us borrow it. I found a farm on Craigslist that sold fertile chicken eggs for $5 per dozen. We trekked out to the farm and picked up 18 fertile eggs. They gave us a barnyard mix, so the eggs were all different shapes, sizes and color variations. We have a possibility of hatching Delawares, Plymouth Barred Rocks, Pure White Leghorn and Rhode Island Reds. Marlie was disappointed that we only had one white egg.

The first few days were super stressful. I had to move the incubator a few times to find the ideal place to keep it. Then we had a San Diego heat wave that made the incubator temperature spike to 102.9, which is a dangerously high temp for chicken embryos. If it gets to 103 for 1/2 hour or more, they typically die :0(
On day 8 we candled the eggs, trying to figure out if they had growing embryos in them. I was worried that our temp spike and the incredible learning curve in the beginning would have killed them all, but we were pleasantly surprised to see red blood vessles growing inside some of our our eggs.

Today is day 10. We've identified 14 as "winners" we can see a moving chicken inside. 2 we think are "yolkers" and weren't fertile. We think 1 is a "quitter" and stopped developing, as today we saw what we thought was a blood ring. Marlie was so sad. It was her favorite white egg that had a possible blood ring. I saw a moving embryo on day 7, but today it didn't move at all. I'm not 100% so we won't take it out yet, but the next few days we will know for sure. 1 egg is so dark that we can't tell if it's a quitter or a winner. It's definitely not a yolker, we can see something dark inside of it, but the shell is so dark and thick that we can't tell! We labled that one with a question mark.

The pictures are very blurry, but do you see the dark spot? There's our chicken!

You can see the air cell on the right side of the egg. This is where the chick first pips or breaks through. It takes it's first breath of air inside it's shell!

And now for the real fun! We made a video!

My initial plan was to incubate the chicks and keep them until they got their feathers, then give them away on Craigslist. The give them away idea didn't last long, the kids talked me into keep some of them. I decided that we'd keep 4 hens (if we get 4 hens!). So while we wait for the eggs to incubate, now we are reading all about chicken coops, arks and tractors. JP said I was crazy, and that he doesn't have time to help me build a chicken coop. So it's up to the kids and me to figure out how to build a coop. We have some time, 11 days and about 6 weeks to be exact to get something ready for them! Hmmm where is that drill?

Photography class

2010-03-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

I recently started taking an informal online photography class. I'm really excited to learn how to use JP's camera. He takes such magnificent photos, and has such a good eye for composition. I, however, take the occasional marvelous photo, with lots of "just okay" ones. There are so many terms that are totally foreign to me, but I'm taking notes (like any good student should) and learning as I go.

I figured that as the family scrapbooker and the one who takes the majority of the photos of the kids, I probably should learn to take better pictures.

So now I have a tiny bit of a working understanding of aperture, otherwise known as f-stop. The smaller your aperture number the shallower your depth of field. So to take a nice crisp clear landscape picture, you want to use a higher aperture. To get a nice blurred background to your picture you want to use a lower aperture. I think that's right, LOL For now, my goal is to learn how the camera works in 'manual' and I'm trying to not worry about composition (that's a weak area for me) Here's what I've done so far for my week 1 and 2 assignments

Week one's assignment was to capture a landscape in a low aperture. This was taken at 22. This was a relatively easy assignment, although like I said I'm not very good at composition...yet...

Week 2's assignment was to use a larger aperture (but it's a smaller number!? strange) and to try to capture the effect called bokeh, where the background is blurry. This photo has an aperture of f3.5. This was s really tough assignment. It took me several hours to figure out why all my pictures kept whiting out. I needed to adjust my... hmmm, I can't remember what's it's called now, anyway I figured it out. And I did it! Do you see the bokeh in the background? I actually like the composition in this photo. Our old broken down fence makes a nice background.

So that's it for now. Stay tuned for more and more lovely pictures (hopefully) from me as I muddle through the next few months of learning how to use a digital SLR. :-)

Tierrasanta tortoise

2010-03-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

Since we moved to Tierrasanta, we heard about a giant tortoise that lived nearby. JP saw it a few months ago, but the kids and I hadn't ever seen it.

Last weekend Blake came running into the house yelling. I thought someone was hurt, but no, LOL, the giant tortoise was walking in our cul-de-sac! I ran for the camera so I could snap a few pictures.

He's an African tortoise of some sort (can't remember what type), and the man who was "walking" him said they got him when he was small about the size of a half dollar! This tortoise was so stinkin fast, I couldn't believe it. I thought tortoises were slow, he said that when Kobae walks at full speed you practically have to run to keep up with him. He walks the tortoise like it's a dog, it was so funny!

The tortoise belongs to the man's daughter and son-in-law. He comes and gets the tortoise this time of year and takes it out to Moab to his lodge, where they stay until October. In Moab the tortoise has a 2 acre "cage", that he often escapes from. He said they take the tortoise hiking and that the tortoise can eat about 100 dollars a week in produce!

It was pretty cool, but now I know to say, "No" to any pet requests for an African turtle, these guys get huge! Blake is already counting the days until October, when Kobae will come back from Moab.

A whole lot

2010-03-12T20:21:00.000-08:00

We've been so busy, it's really crazy how overscheduled we are these days. It's my own fault, there have been so many cool things going on in our neighborhood, church and with our friends that I keep saying yes! Add to that a few others things, we are crazy busy! So here's just a sampling...

Marlie and I went to the American Girl store in Los Angeles for Marlie's friend's birthday. Gosh I love that store, it's marvelous. Can I be 8 again? I want a new doll :-)

Blake had to have another surgery. Praise God it was quick and easy (at least easier than some of his surgeries have been.) He is almost done with the mandatory 4 week soft diet. What a drag it's been!

Bryce started guitar lessons. Not that the boy doesn't have enough with 2 piano teachers and playing drums... But they are offering them for free at church, so I told him he was going, LOL.

Marlie got braces. She looks so cute, I need to charge the camera battery so I can take some pictures of her.

Blake and Marlie both were cast in a musical production of "A Snoodles Tale". Marlie is in the chorus. Blake was cast as Marty Snoodle, and has a solo! So exciting!

So that's just a quick snapshot of what's going on with us. Now my blog isn't a month out of date ;-)

Snow day!

2010-02-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

While most parts of the country are blanketed in snow, we San Diegans drove an hour to find some snow!! It was a lovely day at Mt Laguna this past Friday. We packed up and were up to the mountains by 10:00am. We found a huge hill, perfect for sledding at a campground in Laguna.

This was Mason's first trip to the snow. He kept yelling "snow snow" the entire drive. He had no idea what snow was, but if we were excited, he thought he should be excited too! When we got there, he looked at the snow for about 2 seconds, then went running up the hill squealing with delight. In typical Mason fashion, he did not like his boots and kept kicking them off. A few times he took them off and tried running around barefoot, which is what he does ALL THE TIME at home. Ha ha to him that doesn't work in the snow, and he'd start crying, "Feet cold Mama!"

Just out of the car, checking out the snow

The shoeless Maso strikes again! (Don't you just love my ginormous snow pants? LOL! Bryce's pants were too small, so he wore mine. I couldn't find my second pair so I had to wear JP's)

Of course JP and Bryce brought thier snowboards, but the snowboarding fun doesn't last too long when you have to carry the board up the hill to ride it down!

Bryce sledded more on his fanny, than that sled!

Marlie took a good head over heels tumble on her second run, so she took a several hour break from sledding. Throwing snowballs at Daddy was even more fun though!

Mason is a true Gonzales boy and had a blast sledding from the very top of the hill. It was exhausting carrying him and the sled to the top, but we had so much fun sliding down. I though he'd be scared, as the sleds were really fast and the hill was steep but he loved it.

Forget about yourself, save the baby! Maso and I took a few tumbles, he though it was funny, I however didn't...

And last but certainly not least, I snowboarded. There you go family members who have been hounding me for umpteen years. Happy now? :-P

Crazy Winter Storms 2

2010-01-22T16:10:00.000-08:00

Today, Friday, the rain slowed down a bit during the day. So we grabbed my mom and we all headed down to the beach to watch the waves. The pier was closed, but we had a nice (chilly!) lunch on the sea wall.

The kids fed their leftover pb&j and carrots to the seagulls. Surprisingly, no one gave the gulls their chocolate chip cookies! At one point the gulls completely swarmed Marlie and she came running over and hid under the ledge of the sea wall.

Mason checks out the waves!

The 3 big kids and Nana

The waves were big, but I'm not sure if they were the 15-20 foot waves that were predicted. they were definitely hitting the bottom of the pier, but 20 feet? Hmm. After an entire week of being stuck inside, I don't think anyone cared how big or little the waves were. We were just glad to be out of the house!

Crazy Winter Storms

2010-01-22T14:44:00.000-08:00

I know what you are thinking, "boo hoo winter in San Diego"! No really, we have had the craziest rounds of winter storms that I've seen in a long time! It started on Monday with blasting wind, and ferocious rain. By 10:00 am 1 panel of our back fence was snapped off at the post, and my neighbor with a rain gauge said we already had had 1.5 inches of rain. A few more hours went by and another section of fence was loose and swaying in the wind. Blake helped me tie it up (with his bungee cords, LOL), and it managed to survive without falling down, although it now needs to be replaced too, boo!

You can't really see how bad it is, thanks to Blake's awesome bungee cords!

Tuesday came and dumped more rain on us. When there was a break in the rain, the kids ran outside to splash in the 4 inches of standing water in the backyard. It was windy and sooo cold outside, but they were dying to go outside.Wednesday was light, and we got minimal rain. The backyard "pool" soaked into the grass and the standing water was finally gone.

Thursday the rain pelted us again. By early afternoon we noticed that the branches on the tree in our backyard were leaning down very far. It was raining so hard, that we couldn't go out to check them until later in afternoon. I thought the branches had either snapped off the trunk or were so soaked with water that they were hanging low. When we were able to go out and check the tree it looked fine, and like the branches were just heavy with water. But by dinner time, the tree succumbed to the over saturated ground, heavy limbs, and wind. Praise God it came down slowly. If it had crashed down in one big gust of wind, it would have taken out our patio and dining room. I'm so sad! That tree was my favorite, it shaded the kids fort, and half of our yard in the summer time.

Can you see the huge tree leaning to the left? Timber, LOL!

Marlie turns 8!

2010-01-05T22:13:00.000-08:00

December 28th was Marlie's 8th birthday! We started our day by going to to Jamba Juice for smoothies. Then we headed down to the beach. I know, all you non-San Diegans are jealous :-)

The tide was low, and Marlie and Blake had so much fun collecting shells. La Jolla Shores is pretty shell-less most of the time, so they were really excited to find some treasures. The water was in the mid 50's, not too bad to stick your toes in, but you wouldn't want to get completely wet...

unless you are this crazy guy.

Then you might want to get your clothes soaked and run around in your diaper.

On the Sunday following Marlie's birthday we had a "Dolly Tea party". Marlie's friends all brought a doll or a stuffed animal to the party. I set the dining room table with my Great-Grandmothers china. It looked so pretty, and the girls were so excited about the fancy plates and cups. We had lemonade, little peanut butter sandwiches, sprinkle cookies, fruit kebobs, and pink cupcakes.

I set up two little little areas for the dolls and animals to have tea too. I made little felt cookies, and after tea, the girls all picked two cookies to take home.

They looked so cute, and I had so much fun making them!

The girls all signed their names and drew pictures on this poster. We hung it up in Marlie's room.

We made these cute little "ice cream" sundaes for the girls dolls. I had planned for them to make two per girl, but they liked them so much they each made a bunch! Good thing I had extra supplies.

After a game of red light green light, Marlie and the girls gathered back into the house to make jewelry for their dolls. After the dolls got some new jewelry, the girls made some things for themselves.

They also made little books for their dolls, and dolly treasure boxes. It was such a fun birthday party!

3 out of 4

2009-12-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

Genes are a powerful thing, they make your kids look just like you (or at least your relatives!). But man those genes get expensive!

3 weeks ago Blake got his palatal expander off. They put in an upper holding arch to keep things in place. He was so excited to be free of that appliance. But wait! One chair over was Marlie having her palatal expander put in! They told me I only needed 3 more kids to fill up all the chairs at the orthodontists office,(not funny) So far 3 out of my 4 kids have had funky shaped palates that required reshaping. I should just pre-pay for Mason.

Last week I had a momentary loss of my mind and took all 4 kids to the eye doctor at the same time. Thankfully Mason did not terrorize their office, but turned his Mason charm on. He has them all fooled into thinking he's sweet and well behaved.

Marlie had to get reading glasses last year. She was thrilled, I however felt terrible wondering how long she went being farsided. I meant to have everyones eyes checked just in case but got busy and forgot. Fast forward to last week. Blake is farsided too. So is Bryce. 3 out of 4. ((sigh))

I love a good wedding!

2009-10-24T09:53:00.001-07:00

We went to a lovely wedding last night. They had a photo booth set up in the corner of the reception. There was a bunch of silly props to use in the photos. It was so much fun, and such a good idea!

Not to mention I got to hold someones 10 day old grandbaby (wink wink). I told JP, "I could almost do this again." He laughed at me and shook his head. Good man!

You Belong in the Zoo!

2009-10-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

We used to have zoo passes, but the kids got tired of it and I let them lapse. Yesterday, we got to go to the zoo for free through our homeschool group! I was excited to take Mason, he loves animals and he'd never been there before. Bryce didn't get to come. He has an extra piano lesson with a different teacher twice a month, and it just happened to fall on Tuesday. He didn't seem too upset though, music or zoo hmmmmm? Which would a 13 year old boy choose?

I'd forgotten how big the zoo is, and how much walking you have to do to see everything! We still had a great time even though we were exhausted by the time we were done. I chased Mason all over the place, geez he's fast. I needed a nap when we got home!

Blake's favorites are the meercats!

Whoever made this scultpure must have known that by making his foot off the ground, that children all over the city would lay under it pretending that giant Woolly Mammoth was stepping on them!

Trying to decide where to go next.

My heart did a little flip flop everytime he hung on the bars. My sister knocked her 2 front teeth out this way!

Awww aren't they cute?

Snacking Tips from Mason

2009-08-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Now I know I'm only a toddler, but I've figured out some great snacking ideas. Since my mom has a blog I thought I'd write about it for all the toddlers out there.

#1 Many of you have snack bowls, right on the floor! Did you know that? Probably over half of you toddlers have snacks right at your level! If you have one of those 4 legged toys, look around carefully! You will have a snack bowl and a small splashing pond either inside your house or right by the back door. The snacks are salty, but if you're hungry it's pretty satisfying. Moms really hate it when you eat out of those snack bowls so be extra quiet, it throws them off.

#2 We have big brown snack doors at our house. Your snack doors might be a different color. Ours have some sort of device on them to keep them closed. It's no problem though, just pull one door out as much as you can and reach your hand in the space. You can pull pretty much anything out in about 5 seconds. Moms will usually give you anything from here if you smile and say "uh oh" the whole time.

#3 Our big black snack holder has water that comes right out of it. Of course you need to be tall enough to reach it, and have some sort of container for the water (pretty much any toy works great, if you can find a cup, that's my personal favorite). Once you figure out how to use the water, it's open drinks all the time. Be careful though, my mom gets upset when I spill the water on the floor, something about it being slippery.

#4 To find the mecca of all snacks, check out the floor of the kitchen and or dining room. The people in my house drop so much food. I can't figure out why they let so much go to waste. My mom says it's "yucky", whatever that means. There's tons of snacks to be had right at your fingertips.

#5 Moms keep all the best snacks *hidden* in a large container. Our snack drawer has a handle and pulls right out. Your hidden container might be in a different place, so keep looking until you find it. Anyway, it's another one of those "yucky" things, or so my mom says. I just try to get my snacks when she's not looking, less trouble that way. So I say, go for it!

That's all for now friends, it's my nap time. Tune in next time when I'll be talking about good hiding places!

T-town swim meet!

2009-07-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

It's always fun when your pool hosts the swim meet! The meet this week was at the Tierrasanta pool. JP was working on Saturday, so I had to do this one alone. Swim meets start soooo stinking early, it's a really long day for Mason. Luckily a girlfriend offered to keep an eye on Bryce at the pool, until I got there later in the morning. Blake was bummed that he couldn't swim, we are still trying to rest the broken finger.

Mason ran around the pool deck with my hat on.

He couldn't see anything and kept bumping into things, it was really cute.

Blake is sad, no swim meet for you!

Breast stroke, Bryce's favorite :-) He did really well this meet. If he had been swimming a USA meet like with his old team, he would have made a "B" time in one of his events.

Birthdays, broken bones and braces

2009-07-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

We kicked off the month of July with Bryce's 13th birthday! I can't believe that I'm the mother of a teenager! My very first baby is 13 years old! He picked Home Town Buffet for his birthday dinner (I think it's gross, but he was in heaven). We gave him money to put towards a new electric guitar, which he's been wanting for a while now. JP gave him a picture that he drew for him way back on his first birthday.

Look at how cute he was on his 1st birthday :-)

13th birthday!!

The whole crowd celebrating at dinner.

As if Bryce's birthday week wasn't busy enough, Blake broke his finger over the weekend. I guess he and Bryce were playing football (with a foam ball!!) and the ball hit his finger at the right angle. I didn't see the finger until Sunday, but it was pretty obvious it was broken. It's a hairline fracture, and he has to wear a splint for 2 weeks. The day we were running around to the doctor, getting x-rays and going back for a splint, Blake also got his palatal expander put in. Poor kid, it was quite a day.

12 Days

2009-06-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you had 12 days, 3 hours per day, alone with one of your children? Some people would think, "No big deal". But with 4 kids, 36 hours alone with one child over a 3 week span is awesome!! Bryce and Blake are taking summer classes for 3 weeks. I wanted Marlie to take something too, but she wasn't intrested. When I added up the cost of the classes for 3 kids, I decided it was okay if she didn't want to take them, LOL.
The super cool thing is that after I drop the boys off at class, we come home and put Mason to bed. That leaves us about 3 hours alone, no boys, no Daddy, just Marlie and I. There are so many things that I've been wanting to do with her. This gave us the perfect opportunity!

Monday, after we got home from dropping the boys off at class, we talked about what things we could do together for the next 3 weeks. Marlie's list was pretty basic: bake, paint and sew. So after we put Mason to bed, the first order of the day was making bananna muffins. After that we finished reading, "5 True Dog Stories". Then we dug through my fabric boxes to find scraps for the quilt she wants to make. It was so nice to have that time with just Marlie!

The muffin girl!

Tuesday was even more fun than Monday, we baked, painted, started reading Dr. Doolittle, and played Bingo Bunch.

The blueberry cobbler turned out so pretty!

Our paintings :-)

I'm not sure what's on the agenda for today, I'll have to talk to my coordinator ;-) But I'm thrilled about this time we have together!

Blake turns double digits, the big 10!!!

2009-06-07T09:51:00.000-07:00

I can't believe that the tiny little baby I brought home from the NICU is now 10 years old! Our family tradition is that you get to pick where you want to go to lunch or dinner on your birthday. Blake picked Chuck E. Cheese. We went during the day and it was empty, what luck!!

Luckily I found an online coupon for tokens. 3 kids go thru a ton of tokens!

Anything that shoots rubber darts is a huge hit!

The three biggs.

We had his friend birthday party this weekend. Never again will I say, "Oh sure you can invite all 13 of your friends to your sleepover. Not all of them will be able to come..."

It's amazing how the presents were all tidy and neat in bags. 24 hours later they are strewn all over his room like a giant toystore exploded...

I'm so proud of my question mark cake!
It was a "spy" party, so the question mark totally worked ;-)

Unlikely Hero Play and 63rd Annual Dance Recitals

2009-05-31T08:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was nuts. I knew it was going to be a busy day, but if I even an inkling of how insane crazy it was going to be, I probably wouldn't have gotten out of bed! Blake and Marlie both had shows yesterday. Marlie her dance show at the Casa Del Prado theatre, and Blake had 2 musicals. The schedule was tight, JP and I had to enlist my mom's help and a babysitter to pull it all off. Marlie's show started at 4pm downtown. Blake's first show started at 5pm in Tierrasanta. Both kids had to be at their locations 1 hours before show time with full costume, theatre makeup and hair. I spent a considerable amount of time Friday night gathering everything together and writing a master schedule and instructions for all. Unfortunately, I didn't write the "baby falls off the couch and can't walk so we have to take him to the ER with a possible broken leg" contingency plan.

Little Mason was playing in the front room, on Saturday morning,while I was making breakfast. I heard a thump and a scream, and rushed in to find him on the ground. Blake and Marlie said he fell off the sofa. I hugged him for a minute and he settled down quick. When I went to put him back of the ground he wouldn't stand up. For the next hour I watched him try to stand up, then fall down screaming. So I called the pediatrician and sat on hold for 35 minutes :-( By the time they got to me, it was 10:30am. Too bad for us that radiology closes at 11am on Saturdays!!! She advised me to give him Tylenol and take him to the ER. I probably would have waited a few more hours to see how he was, except for that he was supposed to be staying with a babysitter while JP and I shuttled kids to their shows. I didn't feel good about him staying with her if he could have a broken leg!! So off to the ER we went. I've sat for a really long time at the pediatric ER before, so I thought we were in for a very long day. Praise God they moved fast and I got in there right before a huge rush of people came! They x-rayed his leg and foot and it showed a bad sprain, but nothing more! I was so relived that he was okay.

By this time it was 1:15pm so I raced back home to put our old schedule back into action. Marlie, Bryce and I scooted off to her her recital. My grandma and JP met us there. Marlie did a fab job with her two dances. She knew every step perfectly. The silly girl would not crack a smile, she's so serious! She did such a great job though. While we were with Marlie, my mom ushered Blake off to his production, (and ended up taking Mason with her). After Marlie was done, JP, Grandma, Bryce and I raced up to Blake's second performance. JP grabbed us Jack in the Box (so gross!) and we scarfed it while waiting to get seats for Blake's show. Blake was so much fun to watch. He said his lines loud and clear, and his antics as Invincible IQ were hilarious! After the show he had lots of admirers who asked him for his autograph! By 9:00pm we were done and by 10:15pm everyone was clean and in bed, ready for round 2 of shows for Blake which start at 9am on Saturday morning.

Marlie and Nana in front of the theatre

Mama, Daddy and Marlie

I'm so bad, I couldn't resist snapping a few photos of the kids during

the show. Blake is in the white coat in the middle of the stage.

Dance recitals meets Mega City

We didn't even have time to go home and

get Marlie a change of clothes! She had to watch

Blake's show in her dance costume. When she got up from her seat

there was a pile of feathers that had fallen off her costume!

Homeschooling with a toddler

2009-05-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

Homeschooling is tough, anyone who argues otherwise is wrong, LOL. I was happily homeschooling along, when our journey was interrupted by a 7lb screaming male child. He was tiny and oh so cute. Thankfully he slept a lot in the sling and our homeschooling journey kept bumping along.

Enter the toddler...the happy infant turned into a cantankerous toddler, oh my! Not only is he cantankerous, he's a tornado on two chubby legs! Beware the forgotten pencil that fell on the floor, the video camera left in his reach or the pantry left open. He will destroy, color on, and generally ruin everything within his clutches.

"After I rearrange this pantry, I'm going to get a snack"

Who left their pencil out?? Before I caught him with the pencil, coloring on my refrigerator, he had colored all over the off-white tile.

Oh dear, he can climb up on the sofa all by himself now.

Helping Bryce with his English.

"Pillows can't contain me, ha ha ha ha. I've figured out how to get past them!!"

I guess I shouldn't do math on the floor anymore.

He thinks I'm a horsey ;-)

30 seconds of peace while he looks at a book.

The only cabinet in the kitchen that I leave unlocked.
He can empty it in about 15 seconds.

Locked himself in the garage *again*!

He loves to drop things behind the fireplace screen. Before I stopped him, he had already dropped the fireplace key and Marlie's pink eraser.

So in reality, that's about 30 minutes of time captured in photos. The other 23.5 hours of the day we repeat all of the above, with lots of snacks and a nap or two mixed in. Oh yeah, and homeschooling, don't forget the homeschooling....

Spring break

2009-04-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

Over spring break I planned several activities to keep us busy. The kids were most thrilled about camping at Campland on the Bay. It really is cheater camping with heater restrooms, pools, a restraunt, store etc... But it's so much fun there, we can't resist. Too bad Mason, Marlie and I had to leave early because they were sick. I hardly got any pictures :-( I was too busy taking care of sickies.

JP and Aric unloading the wood from the boat. They carried the swamp thing down to the bay and rowed it around. The kids were thrilled. Too bad the water is so icky, it would be fun to splash around in it.

Mason loved the freedom he had while were camping. He ran all over the place, ate dirt, poked things with sticks etc... It didn't last long though, we was really sick by the second day.

A few days after our camping trip, I had planned for us to take a train trip to LA. It ended up that only Marlie and I were able to go, the boys were still too sick. It turned out nice though, we haven't had hardly any Marlie and Mom time since Mason was born. Instead of calling our days out "mommy and Marlie days" we've been calling them "M days" (Marlie, Mom and Mason). So we finally had some time to ourselves. We hopped on the train at 7am (yawn!) and arrived in LA around 10am. We took a tour of Olvera street, and toured the museums and shops. We found a nice mexican place to lunch and to rest our feet. After lunch we shopped and ate some yummy churros. The ride home was shorter, because we both fell asleep!!

Marlie was thrilled to take such a long trip on the train.

Marlie sitting under a headless statute of the King of Spain.

We had so much fun on Olvera Street!

The Facebook Note

2009-03-09T20:42:00.000-07:00

There's a neat kid questionnaire going around Facebook right now. you ask your kids these 25 questions. Their responses were pretty funny.

Ask your child(ren) to answer the questions and type their answers in.:)I asked Bryce (12), Blake (9) and Marlie (7) these questions.

1. What is something mom always says to you?
Bryce - Bryceeee
Blake - I love you.
Marlie - Go to bed.

2. What makes mom happy?
Bryce - Extremely cool action filled movies.
Blake - When we do the right thing
Marlie - When I help her.

3. What makes mom sad?
Bryce - Family deaths
Blake - When we disobey her.
Marlie - If you and Daddy weren't together ever.

4. How does your mom make you laugh?
Bryce - When she says my name wrong or messes up a sentence. (can we say mommy brain??)Blake - Tickling me
Marlie - By ticking me.

5. What was your mom like as a child?
Bryce - Nice
Blake - I don't know
Marlie - Nice

6. How old is your mom?
Bryce - 33
Blake - 33
Marlie - 33

7. How tall is your mom?
Bryce - 6'4
Blake - 45 inches
Marlie - Tall

8. What is her favorite thing to watch on TV?
Bryce - Lost
Blake - Wipeout.
Marlie - Anything.

9. What does your mom do when you're not around?
Bryce - Hangs out with Dad, goes on her blog, does stuff for school and tries to put Mason to bed.
Blake - Plays with Mason.
Marlie - Plays on the computer.

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?
Bryce - Tap dancing
Blake - Her cooking
Marlie - Making food.

11. What is your mom really good at?
Bryce - Taking care of Mason, tap dancing and doing the laundry.
Blake - Cooking
Marlie - Writing.

12. What is your mom not very good at?
Bryce - Skateboarding
Blake - Putting Mason to bed. (HA! He's teething and has been up all night the past few weeks)Marlie - Leaps (Oh that's funny, she means leaps in dance and she's right!)

13. What does your mom do for her job?
Bryce - Stays at home.
Blake - She doesn't work.
Marlie - Homeschools us.

14. What is your mom's favorite food?
Bryce - Chinese
Blake - Mexican
Marlie - Pasta

15. What makes you proud of your mom?
Bryce - How she encourages me to go out and meet new friends.
Blake - She makes the right choices and does the right thing and makes me laugh.
Marlie - That she homeschools us.

16. If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be?
Bryce - Calvin's mom (from Calvin and Hobbs)
Blake - Super woman.
Marlie - A purple polka dotted monster. (umm what??)

17. What do you and your mom do together?
Bryce - Make jokes.
Blake - Play wii.
Marlie - Go to Build A Bear.

18. How are you and your mom the same?
Bryce - Our eye color.
Blake - We both are mostly happy every day.
Marlie - We have the same color hair.

19. How are you and your mom different?
Bryce - I like my hair long and she likes my hair short.
Blake - I have green eyes and she has blue eyes.
Marlie - My eyes are brown and hers are blue.

21. What does your mom like most about your dad?
Bryce - He's funny and caring and funny.
Blake - He's the husband around here and he makes her laugh.
Marlie - That he's nice.

22. Where is your mom's favorite place to go?
Bryce - Baskin Robbins
Blake - Disneyland
Marlie - Sea World (What's with the theme parks, LOL??)

23. If you would change one thing about your mom what would it be?
Bryce - I don't know.
Blake - Nothing
Marlie - Nothing

Snow Day!!

2009-03-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

Although it's been a warm winter, we've managed to slip a few snowboarding trips into the schedule. I don't know why I say "we", all I do is wave goodbye, LOL!! On Monday JP, the kids, my mom and Eden went snowboarding. This was Marlie's first trip. JP has been dying to get her on the mountain, but she hasn't been interested until this year. Bryce and Blake were really excited that she was going. I think she was more excited about her new pink goggles, than snowboarding. He spent the morning helping her, while Bryce, Blake, Eden and my mom shredded the mountain :-)

Mom and Eden. They've been to the mountain quite a few times this year. Mom bought them a 6 pack of tickets, so they are getting lots of snowboarding in this season.

Blake takes on a box in the park. You can just barely see him in the distance sliding across it.

The crazy "G" gang.

Mar learning to snowboard. JP said that there was a moving carpet in the bunny slope area, which made it much easier for her to learn without having to use the lifts.

Mar posing with her board.

There isn't any sound, but she's so cute I had to add it!!!! I doubt I'll look this cute falling on my fanny when they finally drag me up that mountain to learn to snowboard.

Mardi Gras

2009-03-01T09:14:00.000-08:00

We had a lovely Mardi Gras party in the cul-de-sac last week. Marlie and I spend all afternoon decorating masks and making her a beaded headband. The boys didn't want to make masks, but Blake eventually grabbed a blank one and ran around wearing it.

Mason loved the beads one of the neighbors gave him. The next day he started biting them off the string, so that was the end of the Mardi Gras beads!! My mask drove me nuts and I only wore it for about 30 minutes. The eye holes were too small and I had trouble seeing where Mason was.

JP was styling in his custom made hat. Add to that some of his moms jewelry and his talking drum and he was quite authentic. No one had ever seen a talking drum before, so he was quite a hit. Marlie was so cute with her little mask and beaded headband. The only thing we

didn't have in the craft area in the garage was the mask. I have a feeling Nana G's craft supplies will last a looong time.

Bye bye baby, helloooo toddler!

2009-02-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

There's a transition between infancy and toddlerhood. Sometimes it comes slowly and you hardly notice it. Other times it comes so fast, that you wonder where your baby went!? Mason has been slower at doing new things than Blake and Marlie were, so it seemed like the transition was going slowly. This week Mason decided that he had enough of the baby business and he was going to be a toddler NOW!

He started the week off by walking...everywhere!! Up until this week, Mason has been taking a few steps here and there. When he would fall, he'd be content to continue on his journey by crawling. But not this week, it's big boy week!! So now he is walking everywhere! He can bend over and pick things up without falling and can even change directions :0)

The middle of big boy week came with Mason's first haircut. He wore most of his hair off between 4 and 6 months, everything except for the very top. I thought it looked cute, but Daddy insisted it was time for a buzz job, to even everything out. Mason actually giggled at first and thought it was funny when JP cut his hair. He loves power tools, so when JP let him hold the clippers, Mason was all smiles. Too bad a hair cut takes longer than 2 minutes, which is about the length of his attention span!

One last photo of the baby hair

Your 2 minutes are up!!

All done. Now he looks so much older!

Toward the end of the week, Mason discovered a new found love for coloring! Yes, my 14 1/2 month old colors. He holds the marker in his hand and scribbles to his hearts content. Unfortunately, he now knows what a marker is, so can you guess what happened today?? He colored all over his face and hands with a yellow marker that Marlie dropped. Can we say Mason Marker?

We finished out bye bye baby week with a bath in the sink. He is now officially too old for the sink! He splashed so much, that I had to mop up the floor with beach towels. Marlie thought it was hilarious, until she got all wet!

So the transition from baby to toddler that I thought was going to be nice and slow, is now here. It's not nice and slow at all, it's too fast. But don't Mason that, he has places to go and people to see ;-)

Worm Farm

2009-02-01T07:55:00.000-08:00

Blake is taking an ecology class at class day. One of their first projects was a landfill in a shoe box. They added all sorts of biodegradable and non-biodegradeable stuff to their landfills to see what would happen. After a couple of months, they added worms to the landfill. Blake took such good care of his worms that, they multiplied and multiplied and multiplied!! They outgrew the shoebox and needed a bigger space. Last week we moved the worms to a bigger box.

Blake and Marlie getting the new box and bedding ready for the worms.

Blake insists that they are his pets.

Ack, an escapee!!! When they transfered the worms, we had a few that didn't make it into the new box, LOL!

The old worm box, and the new one, all ready for more worms!

Shameless mom bragging

2009-01-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I need a shameless bragging blog post ;-)

We finished getting the garage transformed into a game/music/craft room. It's not totally organized yet, but it's at least put together! We saved the drum set that Jorge had in his music room, and JP set it up out there. Within a few hours we were a little deaf, but shocked at what Bryce had figured out. I think we need a little more foam to absorb the noise, I mean music.

Blake started on the swim team in September. He has been dying to dive off the diving blocks at swim practice. They are very high, 7 inches higher than your regulation size blocks. Someone fouled up when they installed them. Bryce says the combo of the angle and extra height is annoying, lots of kids fall off when they are learning to dive off them. Blake dove off beautifully, the very first time! I tried to get a picture but all I got was his splash! So his second time, I took a video instead :-) Sorry that it's sideways, I forgot that you can't turn a video right side up when you are done with it.

We'd been noticing some interesting eye activity in Marlie the last few months. A trip to the eye Dr. confirmed that she is farsighted! Today we picked up her glasses. She only has to wear them when she reads or does schoolwork. She'd like to wear them all the time, but she's too rough and tumble to wear them all the time. She looks so cute!

And last but not least, little Mason. He's not doing anything new or exciting just yet, unless you call hitting people, screaming and biting new and exciting. (((sigh))) I've forgotten how hard this age is. But he's cute, I'll give you that.

ETA- Okay, I completely take the "He's not doing anything exciting comment" back!! He slept thru the night last night. I put him to bed at 7pm and he woke up at 7:30am, ahhhhh. It only took 14 months LOL!!

Marlie Marker turns 7!

2008-12-28T21:26:00.000-08:00

Today is Marlie's birthday, she's 7 years old!! I was so thrilled when we found out we were going to have a baby girl. I didn't buy anything pink when I was pregnant, I was so afraid she'd come out a boy and I'd be disappointed. She was a super mellow baby, until she hit about 10 months and started throwing tantrums!! She was my biggest baby at 8.9lbs. She stood earliest, 5 months, walked earliest at 11 months and potty trained earliest at 15 months. From about 18 months old she would color all over herself. I thought it was a passing phase, but she did it for several years, at least twice a week, hence the nickname Marlie Marker! She loves horses and kittens, her bitty baby, sparkly jewelry and her baby brother who she called Mace face and Maso the Moose.

Happy Birthday Marlie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

3 years old and loving playing in the water in Catalina.

4 years old. On our way to Big Bear for Christmas, she spotted the "M" on the mountain and insisted that it was Margo World.

Sound asleep with her doll "Hannah"

`1`

Always hamming it up for the camera

All ready for her first dance recital.

A ladybug for Halloween.

Kindergarten graduation

Learning about the continents in 1st grade

Such a pretty girl, all dressed up!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-27T11:08:00.000-08:00

Our first Christmas in our new house was awesome! We had 27 people for Christmas dinner, our biggest crowd yet! We had out of town family, and friends over too. As promised, JP delivered the secret family salsa, much to every ones delight! The carne asada, tamales and enchiladas were so yummy, (thank heavens for leftovers!!) JP finished the "youth room" in the garage, and the drum set and Christmas Wii were a big hit! Our family talent show was hilarious. Blake wowed us with magic. Nana and my sisters rapped a "sports girls" rap. Paige and Kassidy played the piano. Claire and Lucy danced. Bryce played the piano while Marlie sang. JP showed off his art. I tap danced. Nana did the hula. I think everyone had a great time, and I was already hearing chorus's of "next year I'm going to...."

The day after Christmas we spent several hours at the beach with the Berggrens. Low tide was really really low, it must have been a negative tide. The kids had so much fun scouring the beach for shells and little creatures. The seals at the children's pool delighted the out of town girls. Marlie made friends with complete strangers (nothing new there) and ran through a sand labyrinth they had made.

We celebrated Marlie's birthday that night at Nana's house, then hugged everyone goodbye and came home and crashed. It was a great, Christmas holiday.

One down, one to go!!

2008-12-23T21:32:00.000-08:00

I did it!! I sucessfully excecuted my very firstChristmas party, complete with a big dinner (well lunch actually). We had JP's family over on Saturday for the Allison Family Annual Christmas Party. I was so worried about having to cook everything, have the house clean, boxes unpacked etc... Everything went off without a hitch. I didn't burn anything or break anything. I only forgot one item, gravy, oops! It was a great party, and excellent practice for the "big one", Christmas Day, with 22 people!!! Here's just a few pictures of the kids from the party. JP's camera is awesome. I think I'll be stealing it more often, shhhhhhhhh.

Did you leave your "goodwill toward men" at home?

2008-12-15T11:08:00.001-08:00

I spend way too much time at Costco, too much time and too much money. I think it's because for the last 8 years it's been a 2 mile drive away. Why on earth would I go to the grocery store if blessed Costco is even closer?? When people drive into the Costco parking lot they leave their brains in the car. Oh wait, I think they leave it at home. At Christmas time they forget their "goodwill towards men" at home too.

I went to Costco 3 times last week. The first was a necessity, the second time I should have gotten what I needed when I went the 1st time (but I forgot!). The 3rd time was a party emergency ;-) When I went the first time, I went to the Costco by our new house. This is where everyone left their Christmas spirit at home. People were so rude, it was unbelievable. The major issue? Free samples. Now I like a sample as much as the next person. I especially like the yummy bread and good cheese. But I refuse to push and shove people out of the way, or stick my hand through the crowd to get it. I'm always amazed that a bunch of adults can't wait their turn for a morsel of free food. Do they not see the 3 children who were standing there first waiting politely for the item to be finished cooking? Or the lady with a baby strapped to her chest, do they see her waiting? Or am I sooo skinny that I'm invisible (that *must* be it!), that they must run and stand in front of me!!!

I felt really bad for the women making the samples, they looked frazzled and stressed out as people pushed and shoved their way to the free food. No one said "hello" or even "thank you" to the poor women! When my kids said thank you to one of the ladies, she said it was the first time all day that someone had thanked her.

The rudness extened to the parking lot too. On my second trip, I loaded 10 metal folding chairs in my car while a man scowled at me the whole time. Apparenlty I wasn't vacating my parking spot fast enough.

During my third trip to Costco one lady had "I forgot my brain at home syndrome" and nearly backed into Marlie, Mason and I as we walked thru the parking lot. The lady was waiting for a parking spot and decided to back up, as we walked behind her car. She was only a few inches away from hitting us. Marlie screamed, I yelled, it scared us both. I think it was that "I"m so skinny I must be invisable" thing again...

Not everyone is rude at Costco, there are a few nice people. There was that nice man who loaded my car when I was 9 months pregnant with Mason. He was an EMT and didn't want me to go into labor in the parking lot. He said he didn't want to have to deliver my baby. :-) But I think the rudeness is much worse during the holidays. I've been run into with a cart (ouch!), my kids have been run into with carts (that made me mad!!), I've even had my foot ran over by a car in the Costco parking lot (the guy was lucky he didn't really hurt me!!). By far my favorite Costco story is the one that inspired my blog's name back in February of last year. The "How Did I Get Here" Story?

Now that we live farther away from Costco, I'll probably be shopping there less. I guess I'll have to plan ahead. That's okay though, less chance for frustration and injury...

Black eyes and braces

2008-12-03T11:11:00.000-08:00

There's never a dull moment in our family! Black eyes and braces... It would be funny if it was the "B" named boys who had these 2 things, but it's only one of them.

My birthday baby has a black eye :-( Poor little Mason! He fell twice within 2 days and hit almost the same spot both times. The first time the back eye wasn't too bad. I had to cancel his 1st birthday pictures, and I figured he'd be fine within a few days. Then he fell 2 days later, and it instantly swelled up again! By the afternoon it looked awful! It's been nearly 2 weeks and he still has a bit of a shiner. We've started calling him Bruiser, and unfortunately for him, I think the nickname is going to stick, for a long time. You can sort of see it in the picture. I just couldn't bear to take a picture of the black eye at it's worst.

Our other excitement...braces... Our orthodontist has been watching Blake's teeth for several years. Kids with clefts often have major teeth issues and need many many (did I say many yet?) years of braces. Just about 2 months ago our favorite orthodontist retired :-( He's the guy who did my braces, all my sisters braces and Bryce's expander. I was, and still am, so sad. But it was a blessing in disguise. I had planned to use the orthodontist who bought the practice, but on the recommendation of the cleft team went with the head of orthodontics for the cleft team, Dr. Robert Jacob. This is phase 1 of 3 phases of braces Blake will have to have, spanning about the next 10 years of his life (poor guy!) He will have some time not wearing braces, but more time wearing them, coupled with a few more surgeries. So for now, he has bands on 4 molars, and braces on his 2 front teeth. They will be moving his 2 front teeth together, and at the same time pulling his molars backwards. Next week he will get a lower holding arch to make his bottom front jaw and teeth round out a bit. In 6 months to 1 year he will get an upper palatal expander. We are praying that his 2 front teeth will move without any trouble (those are the two that he badly damaged last year), and that the sideways tooth that is appears like it will grow out the side of his gum, will move down nicely.

Blake always has such a good attitude, even thru all the medical junk he has to deal with.

But he wouldn't smile at me afterward. This was a good as it got.

24 hours later, he was fine, and I got a big cheezy grin!

h

s

You want house pictures?

2008-11-21T21:24:00.000-08:00

I have house pictures. It's still a terrible mess, but hopefully everything will be done by Christmas, when everyone comes to visit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the master bathroom. I need something on the walls and a towel rack.

((sigh)) Our bedroom is the biggest mess of all. All the boxes of JP's moms pretty things are in here for us to sort. You can sort of see our new headboard. I got it at JcPenny for a song!

The kids rooms went together fast. They were eager to get things set up. I think Marlie needs curtains...

Blake is happy to have his old high bed. It makes a great lego building place underneath!

Our dining room table came last week. It fits perfectly in the dining room, with more room to spare than we though we'd have. It has a large leaf, which will be great for Christmas dinner!!

My friend Angela unpacked the kitchen almost entirely by herself. I was so thankful!

The family room was pretty fast too. Do you see my getto internet cord? LOL we need a longer one that will go around the room instead of thru the middle of the room!

Bryce's room is a mess too!

Downstairs bathroom. It needs some art or something. It's boooring.

The living room will take the longest. All those bookshelves need to be filled up, and JP neds to put all the tv, dvd, music stuff away.

Awww he's so much help...NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The birthday baby

2008-11-20T07:12:00.000-08:00

Good Morning Birthday boy!!! Ready for some breakfast? I never thought I'd have another baby who could inhale food the way Bryce did. But this child can pack it in!! He ate a whole bananna (not a small one either!) and a whole peach and another half of a peach for breakfast.

Nana and Eden came over to visit Mason and wish him a happy birthday.

By 5:00 the birthday boy was miserable. He had a cold and was cutting teeth. He opened his presents (with lots of help from Bryce, Blake and Marlie) and then we went out for Chinese food. He loves stir fry, orange chicken and chow mein. He was pretty cranky though, and it was practically impossible to get him to smile in any picture at the restaurant.

At home we sang to him, and gave him a cupcake. He poked at the cupcake for a second, then attacked it. He practically shoved the whole thing in his mouth at once. It was pretty funny. The big kids were grossed out because he was such a mess. He ate the entire thing, and was happy as a clam (probably from the sugar high!) I popped him in the bath and promptly put him to bed. He slept great that night, but was miserable the next day. 2 days later, he had a molar break thru!

It was a a fun birthday for the big kids and JP and I, but I'm not sure he appreciated it. Hopefully he will be feeling better for his big birthday party.

Happy Birthday Mason

2008-11-19T08:54:00.001-08:00

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Signing off and sad news

2008-11-07T21:00:00.000-08:00

First the sad news. I found out today that one of my very good friends, that I've known since high school, has cervical cancer. Praise God, it's only stage 1, but it's still scary. I never wanted to go thru cancer again, especially of the female type and especially with someone I'm very close with. But God has other plans for me and for her. Please pray for her, she's a single mom and has 4 children. :-(

So I'm signing off. I'm packing my computer up tonight. We won't have internet in our new house until Monday at the earliest. When I'm back online, we will have a new address, a new phone number and a NEW HOUSE!

2008-11-03T22:32:00.000-08:00

I had huge long post typed out and blogspot ate it. So here's the short version

We move in Saturday.
Everyone is super excited.
Our sprinklers leak and our water bill was $148!
We don't have any hot water upstairs.
JP is doing a fab job on the kitchen counter tops.
Mason is teething and cranky.
I'm trying to pack the house up and it's hard.

There, that was easy, LOL!

Eating Mexican food in the family room :-)

Mason's room is nearly done! He just needs a shelf, and some hooks, oh and a door ;-)

Do you like my fancy dining room floor? LOL it's concrete! I had a brilliant idea to stain it, (I watch too many home shows). Poor JP had to do all the work, but it turned out great!

The kitchen is nearly done!

Bryce's room just needs sheets, and a closet organizer. He loves the Ikea bookshelf and desk. I think we will have to drag him out of here...

Windows and a kitchen!!!!

2008-10-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

This past week was insane. Bright and early Monday morning, the kids and I went over to the house to meet the window installer. In no time, he made gaping holes in my house, where the old sliders used to be! It was suppoded to take 3 days to install the doors and windows, but ended up taking until Friday.

Here's the back of the house, with the new windows installed. They went in pretty easy, the hard time was all of the trim work on the inside.

Side note, look at the cute baby!!

The biggest job of all was the balcony sliding door. It took 4 guys to hoist the thing up and over the balcony (there was no way to get it inside and up stairs).

When they were taking the old door out, they Broke the old door. It shattered with a huge bang that scared my poor mom to death. She was in the closet painting. She thought they dropped the new door! There was glass everywhere, on the balcony, in the bedroom and on the driveway One of the installers cut his arm on the glass. It's been 4 days and I'm still finding pieces of glass on the driveway.

Here's little Maso's room. It's not done, yet, but it's coming along.

Blake's room is all painted.

Marlie's room is shockingly pink. I don't love it, but she does! My aunt gave her an antique bed that belonged to my great grandmother. It looks so cute in there.

Thursday morning at 7:30 we met the cabinet installer at the house. He banged out our kitchen in 2 days. It looks so awesome! My mom painted the kitchen on Tuesday, it's the color of my current kitchen. :-)

It was a loooong week, and everyone was exhausted. This week won't be quite so crazy. Hopefully I can spend more time at home packing up for the big move!

2 Steps Forward, 1 Step Back

2008-10-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

Work on the house is moving along, slowly but surely. We've had a bit of excitement, some very good and some very bad. So the really exciting good news is that we found a secret room! One night, JP and his 2 friends were working on running a gas line to the kitchen for a gas range. They cut a hole in the closet in Blake's room, thinking that there was probably a small crawl space behind it that they could use the run the line. Not only was there a crawl space, but a small room! It's about 6 feet, by 8 feet with a slanted roof. Blake and Marlie can stand up in it, but the rest of us can't. It's paneled in really old pressed fiber board. They even found a really old pillow in there! The dads were totally freaked out at first, they weren't sure what they'd find in the room. The kids were so excited, it's a pretty cool space. Today Jim ran a light, an exhaust fan, and some other kind of fan. Hopefully the fans will be enough to cool the "Ann Frank" room off enough so it can be a fun place to play. Here's a picture of the room, from the hole in Blake's closet. There are 2 other doors in the secret room, that lead to the crawl spaces the guys were looking for. We will lock those, so no one can go in them.

My kitchen cabinets came in last week! We were so thrilled to get the phone call telling us they were being shipped out. We were not thrilled when they DROPPED the pantry cabinet on it's corner and broke it :-( This is our family room, the only place big enough to put all of the cabinets until they will be installed next week (all but the pantry anyway). JP's been working hi fanny off installing ceiling fans and lights in every room. It's been quite a job considering he had to run all of the wiring too. We ran into a huge problem finding ceiling fans with standard size bulbs. Apparently they don't make fans with standard bulbs anymore. They only make them with candelabra bulbs or intermediate bulbs (which are practically impossible to find). Anyway his solution was to take the light kits off all 5 ceiling fans and replace the small sockets with larger ones. It's a really tedious job, but it will be worth it when it's done.

Today we (my Mom, my Grandma, Chris and I) finished painting the Master bedroom. It's a really pretty blue with a brown accent wall. I love the way it turned out!!

Can you see that the ugly cabinet from over the toilet is gone? It makes the bathroom look so much bigger with it gone!

We also worked on painting Blake's room today. He really wanted to help, and actually did a pretty good job painting.

They are supposed to be working on school work. But when you leave 4 kids alone in a room and tell them to "get to work" they don't always work very *hard*. Where *is* Marlie anyway???

The kitchen is all ready for the cabinet install next Thursday. We just need to paint it yellow. JP and Jim did a great job on the drywall repair. Barry ran me a gas line Whoo hoo!!

Jim finished my hallway closet door. It just needs to be textured and painted.

The view from the top of the stairs. JP and Jim finished the ceiling and installed the fan. They painted the room and ceiling, and the next day moved our things out of storage. I never even got to see the room all done, clean and empty before the filled it up again. Oh well!

Progress!!

2008-10-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

JP and I have been homeowners for 18 days now. We've done quite a bit of work in 18 days, although sometimes it feels like we've hardly done anything (probably because there's so much left to do!)

The new downstairs closet has an opening (though a strange one, it was the only shape that would work with the existing plumbing under the stairs). The area where the built in is dry walled up nicely and just needs to be textured.

We now have electrical ran to the celings in every room. All the ceilings have little rectangualr holes randonly cut in them, so they could pull the wiring thru. JP and Jim have most of the popcorn ceiling scraped and textured. We had to rent a massive scaffold to scrape the vaulted ceilings in the living room and staircase. All that's left to scrape and texture is the dining room, family room and Bryce's room. Scraping ceilings makes a huge mess and it's everywhere! It's too bad that the carpets were already professionally cleaned, by the previous owners. It will probably need to be done again.

I was waffling on paint colors for several weeks. Last Monday JP said I had to have all the paint colors picked out and I need to get everything to the house by Tuesday morning! I was sooo not ready, so he said I had until Tuesday night LOL! The color in the middle is the west living room wall, the north and south walls are the color on the right. The yellow is from my kitchen in the Clairemont house and will go in the new house's kitchen too.

Mason and I were the talk of the paint departament at Home Depot. 39 gallons and one quart of paint is a lot to mix up!! It took them a mere 2 hours to do all the mixing. I picked paint colors from Restoration Hardware and had Home Depot mix them, it was much less expensive than the RH paint (and I had a coupon for $5 off each gallon of Behr paint!!) There were 2 paint reps in the paint dept and several Home Depot employees. They were all making googily faces at Mason, giving him stickers and stuff. The Behr representative actually gave Mason a Behr paint truck! He said we bought so much paint it was the least he could do, LOL!

Everything in excess

2008-10-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

Today I got a package in the mail. I was expecting a package, but this box was huge. When I saw it, I thought maybe my UPS man dropped it at the wrong house. I checked the address and indeed it was my package. But it was much bigger than I expected. Hmmm something wasn't right.

See the sharpie? It's for size reference...

So I open the package and it's full of packing paper.

Okay, hmmm another box.

After all that work I finally get to what I ordered. 3 bathroom items, a soap dish, soap dispenser and a toothbrush holder. Do you see all the boxes, packing paper, foam, and packing bubble stuff behind the 3 things I ordered?? Crazy. The store shall remain nameless, LOL but I was pretty surprised. I might email them this picture, just so they can see how overboard they went with packing this package.

Excess, overabundance, overkill, overabundance, surplus. I've always thought I was pretty good at keeping our house semi-free of unnecessary stuff. Now that I've been packing up this little house, I think I was wrong. How is it that I'm able to pile up giant trash bags of clothes, books, and other miscellaneous items for the Salvation Army every few weeks? You'd think that at the rate I'm cleaning out stuff that we'd be naked, hungry or bored. But we aren't any of those things. There's plenty of clothes, toys and books around this house and as the weeks go by, I'm finding more to get rid of. It feels good to declutter. It really makes me think about how much stuff we really need, and how much is just excess...

Pictures of the new house, as promised.

2008-09-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

So I've been promising everyone that I'd put up pictures of our new house. I just haven't had the chance, so now that little Maso is sleeping and the house is quiet, I thought I'd get busy. I don't have a ton of photos, but I have some :-)

We signed our final papers on Tuesday the 16th of September. Escrow closed at 5pm that night. Our escrow was exactly 17 days long, the number our realtor kept telling us was possible if we could ever decide on a house LOL!

Wednesday night, we went over to our house and ate dinner in the back yard. The kids were so excited and weren't eating, but running all over the yard instead. We'd been outside about 15 minutes, when we heard a squeaking noise coming from way up high in the backyard trees. Can anyone guess what was up in our tree?

If you guessed a humming bird you are wrong. There were TWO and a little tiny humming bird nest! Okay, here's where I'll school those of you who might not know the full story. JP's parents passed away, and that's why we had the money to buy this house. We miss them terribly and this whole house thing is very bittersweet. His mom was a humming bird freak, and when I say, freak I mean it in the kindest most endearing way. She had humming bird everything; towels, plates, cups, refrigerator magnets, broaches, EVERYTHING. So imagine my shock and near hysteria when I saw the 2 little birds in my tree, just sitting there. Luckily thru my sobs I had the prescence of mind to snap a picture, because I didn't think anyone would believe me. It was very far up and I had to digitally zoom in on it so it's a bad shot, but I got a picture.

So we closed on Tuesday, and by Thursday we had ordered kitchen cabinets and double paned windows. We are having Home Depot do the installs, but we opted to do the kitchen demo ourselves and save a ton of money. I had wanted to get a bunch of pictures of the house before we touched a single thing on it. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) the friend we hired to work on the house with JP, is very very fast, and in one afternoon had my entire kitchen ripped apart. By day 2, the old funky built in cabinet in the family room was gone and the makings of a hall closet were there, also the doorway between Blake and Marlie's room was almost walled in. Soooo I'm going to have to check the old listing to see if I can swipe some before pictures!! But I'll have plenty of pictures from here on out, LOL. I learned my lesson.

Here's the now demolished kitchen :-) You can still see the imprint of the old cabinets. The new ones will go in the exact same place. We could have rearranged them a bit, but we liked the layout of the old ones so we left it alone.

Blake and Marlie's room had an accordian door in between them. It would have been perfect if Blake and Bryce were in these rooms, but that would mean that Marlie or Mason would have to have had the bedroom downstairs and we didn't want to do that. Jim framed up the doorway lightning fast! Boring picture of the upstairs kid bathroom.

Masons room! I brought over his crib last week, so we'd have a place to put him to bed when we were working. He's in the pack and play at home still, so it worked out perfect. Those wall shelves are coming down.

The view from the top of the stairs looking down to the living room. Don't you love the beautiful light fixture? The picture dosen't do it any justice. It's made of solid wood, and has 10, yes 10 lightbulbs!!! I can't wait to replace it.

Another boring bathroom picture. This one is the downstairs bathroom. That cabinet above the toilet is so ugly. I'm not sure what to replace it with though.

Here's where the built in tv cabinet was. It was a cool cabinet, but it didn't have doors, and I really didn't want a tv in the family room, so out it came! There wasn't a hall closet downstairs, so we opted (actually I begged and pleaded to get this closet!) to turn the space into a closet. The door will be sort of a funky shape, to get around the pipes in the closet, but it will be useable. Also JP cleaned up a space in the far back just below the stairs for a little hideout. He found some old carpet in the attic and is going to carpet the area.

This is where the old door to the back of the built-in cabinet was.

The last of the boring bathrooms. Any ideas for yet another funky cabinet??

Last but not least, befire it was too dark, I snapped this picture of the dining room. It's very small (11x10) and I'm having trouble finding a table that's big enough for us and friends, but will fit in the room. Anyone have ideas??

The first day back at swim team!

2008-09-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

We had a nice break from swim team, 3 glorious weeks (for me anyway!) without driving to swim team. Bryce went absolutely bonkers without swimming. He begged for me to take him over and let him swim laps "Just once mom, pleeeeease!" I took him and let him swim laps for a while last week. I am so nice, LOL. Bryce was especially thrilled to go back to swim, since he got bumped up to the gold team, woot woot!!! I am amazed that he's already on gold. It's only been a little more than 1 year since he started swimming. He is way better of a swimmer than all of us. He'd beat me in a race any day! The demands of gold team are much higher. Their warm up (for the very first day back from 3 weeks off) was a 500 meter swim. For those of you non-swimmer, a typical lap pool is 25 meters long, so that works out to be 20 laps just as a warm up!! It's good for him though, he needs the exercise :-)

Swim team pretty much consumes our afternoons 3 days a week. Last year Blake and Marlie took a few sessions of swimming lessons too keep themselves occupied, while Bryce swam. So this season, I decided to start Blake on the swim team as well. He was so excited to try out, and made it on the novice team. I figure he's at the pool all the time, he might as well swim too. It will be a good thing for Blake. He's never had a lot of stamina. Swim team will help him build

endurace and strength. He was so tired the first day of practice. Todays practice was better, but

he was still exhausted.

Look how cute Blakey is! And just by

chance, I caught Bryce in the background!

Blake's first laps at practice.

Let the wild rumpus begin!

2008-09-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

"Where The Wild Things Are", is one of my favorite childrens books. I can tell you where the wild rumpus is, it's at my house! We made it thru the first week of school, but just barely. Of course we had to find our dream house 1 week before school started, right? So among regular school busness, last week was filled with appointments, phone calls etc... Just when we'd settle down to start woking the phone would ring!!

But back to the wild rumpus, -school-. That dreaded thing that all children age 5-17 have to do. My kids want to know who the person was who made it a law that kids have to do school. I told them I was sure that person was dead, LOL. But they still weren't happy. They'd love nothing more than to play legos, swim and jump on the furniture (not that I let them do that or anything) all day long.

So we started school on Tueday the 2nd. The first order of buisness is always cleaning out the pencil boxes, and sorting out the new school supplies. After that, we went on our annual trip to the donut shop. I mean we have to start the first day of school with a sugar high right?? ha! So after the donuts, we came back home and worked for about 2 hours. We did a pretty light week, and I think the kids were relieved.

This year I'm still using my KISS method for school (keep it simple stupid). I spent so many years knocking myself out doing crazy unit studies and history/science stuff. Don't get me wrong, it was really fun. But I decided that it better for all of us, to do a basic program of school work without the extra fluff, and go play all afternoon (meaning go to the beach, the park, hiking etc..) The play all afternoon part has been harder with Mason, he likes to nap (imagine that!).
We had tons of free time together last year just by cutting out the projects and such. I sort of miss the projects, but the time we spent made up for it. They made their own projects with their free time ;-)

Today, Blake told me that he loved school, but he just didn't want to admit it. ;-P

Inspection, windows and kitchen, Oh My!

2008-09-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was our inspection, appraisal, window measurement appointment and kitchen measurement appointment. It was nuts! We arrived at the house at 8:30. The current renters introduced us to a neighbor. He was very friendly and told us all about the other neighbors and the activities that they do together. They have holiday parties! Quite different from our neighborhood hit and runs, LOL!!!

Anyway, the house was a mass of people, 1 inspector, 1 appraiser, 1 window guy, 1 kitchen guy, 2 realtors, my mom, one of my friends, our 4 kids, and JP and I. As if that wasn't enough, the gardeners showed up, HA! 16 people all running all around doing different things. I was supposed to be choosing paint colors, but it was so crazy, that I couldn't think straight. Instead I went thru the kid size bedrooms and decided who was going to be in which room.

Now I know that new windows are expensive, but I had *no* idea they were that expensive. Actually the windows aren't too bad, it's the 3 sliding doors that are the big expense. So we might pull 1 slider out, frame the opening smaller and use French doors instead, and take one other slider out and put a window in instead.

In all the excitement, I completely forgot to take pictures. I'll take pictures the next time we are over. Our realtor/lender is hoping we will close the 15th!!! That's not even a 30 day escrow! I won't believe it until I get the keys though, YIPPIE!

Remove screaming icon, insert ---> WE ARE IN ESCROW!!!

2008-08-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

Hooray we are in escrow!! We got the phone call this morning :0) Realistically we are looking at a closing date of September 26th. We probably won't move until mid to late October after we renovate a few things and paint. This house is perfect for us, it's on a cul-de-sac and has a huge yard. The house is a little smaller than the last one we put an offer in on, but we were willing to give up the inddor space for the huge yard!!!! It's big enough for a pool (someday maybe!) but still big enough to be able to play. Our inspection is Wednesday, the second day back to school. This will be a very busy first month of school LOL!!!! It's 5749 El CABO COURT :-)!!

Insert screaming icon here -->

2008-08-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

I am so angry. So very irritated and annoyed. It's a long story, but I need to vent so here goes.

We've been looking for a house since December. There's one particular area we want to be in, and it's a nice area, but it's more expensive (Tierrasanta). We always seem to be a "day late and a dollar short" when we make offers.

6 weeks ago we put an offer in on a forclosure. 1 week later the realtor for the bank came back and said they need extra paperwork signed etc.. So we signed it all and our realtor faxed it in. 1 week later they said they had multiple offers and gave us the chance to put our final offer in. We upped our offer by quite a bit, and faxed it over. They said they would let us know when they accepted an offer.

So it's been 1 month since then. Our realtor has called and emailed with no response. Yesterday they email our realtor and tell him that the offer that they accepted had fallen out of escrow! They didn't even call us to tell us that they had accepted an offer. So we were super annoyed. Then they tell us that they are starting the process all over again, and if we want to make a *new* offer we can!

Then this afternoon, our realtor finally gets a live person over at the bank's realtors office. He wants to know why the bank isn't just going to accept our offer if it was the next one in line. Apparently the realtor DIDN'T SUBMIT OUR OFFER TO THE BANK! They said we were missing a document (that we weren't missing!) so they didn't submit the offer. But they told us that they had everything we needed and they'd submit the offer to the bank! They completely lied to us. I'm so angry. We've waited 6 weeks for nothing.

On the other hand, yesterday in our quest to see if they were relisting the house, I found another house that is perfect. It's not as big as the previous house, but it has a bigger yard, and it's on a cul-de-sac. So we submitted an offer on that one. We heard today that it has 2 other offers on it, so we will see. I'm just so stressed out and frustrated. We've been looking for 9 months. We've probably looked at 50 houses and submitted offers on 8. This is supposed to be the worst housing market ever and we are fighting for houses, it's crazy.

Here's the new one, the one we put the offer in on yesterday
http://www.realtor.com/search/listingdetail.aspx?zp=92124&mxp=31&bd=5&bth=5&typ=1&sid=ce7577fb794a4631a89c96ad482bc4a0&pg=2&lid=1102657089&lsn=11&srcnt=15#Detail

The 12 year old trip!!

2008-08-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Ever since before we were married, JP wanted to do a special trip with our kids when they turned 12. Turning 12 is a huge deal in the Jewish community, and is the standard age of accountability in the Bible. Well, obvioulsy we aren't Jewish, but JP and I think it's lame that Christians don't make a big deal of becoming a man, like most other religions do. So we made our own tradition, The 12 Year Old Trip. The purpose of the trip was to talk about *everything*; what we expect of him as he gets older, our family history, what we expect for the dating years, everything you could possibly think of was written on a 2 page list, to be discussed during the trip.

JP had been planning for them to go hiking in Death Valley for the 12 year old trip. He hiked it once in his 20's and though it would be a good place for him and Bryce to go. I had visions of a miserable 12 year old walking all over the desert, cranky and hot with nothing to do LOL. So I suggested camping on Catalina Island. JP had taken youth groups there before and was very familiar with the area. He liked that idea, (whew!) so he made reservations for him and Bryce to go to Catalina.

They were gone for 5 days, hiking, snorkling, and mostly talking about becoming a man. They went cliff jumping (go Bryce!!), ran into a few rattle snakes and watched the stars at night... It was a wonderful experience for Bryce and JP, and I know Bryce will remember that trip for the rest of his life.

Here's their camp site. What a great view!!

After their long talks, Bryce spent lots of time journaling.

Bryce and JP

Isn't this gross? It's a homemade hornet trap, (a Gatoraid bottle with holes poked in the sides). I guess the hornets are really bad there in the summer.

Beach camping

2008-08-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

I think my favorite vacation is beach camping (okay okay, aside from staying in a 4 star hotel, LOL). But really, you can't beat $35 a night for an ocean view! We stayed from Sunday to Thursday. I was a little worried about camping with Mason. He's been a lousy sleeper these past few months and everyone going in and out of the trailer usually wakes him up. So I had JP set up our little 4 person tent for him and I to sleep in. He slept great, hooray!

The weather was warm, and so was the water. Mason loved the water! He crawled all over the beach at low tide, splashing in the puddles. I thought he'd cry when the water rolled over his legs, but he didn't. He just laughed. Looks like we have another water lover.

On this trip, last year, Blake knocked out his 2 front teeth. This time, JP stepped on a stingray! Poor guy, it was really really really painful. We kept running up and down the ramp from our campsites to the beach with boiling water to soak his foot in. Eventually, we had to get the lifeguards to take him up to our campsite, because it was too far for him to walk. He said it was the most painful thing he's ever experienced. The kids were super freaked out, and no one wanted to go into the water until he came down from the campsite and went back in the water.

Jessica let me borrow her super yard, and boy was it nice! Little Maso is all over the place, so having him contained was extremely helpful. We jokingly called it his super cube, because she could only find 4 of the panels instead of all 8. He didn't seem to mind that it was smaller than it was suposed to be.

After 5 days I was ready to go home. It was a great trip, but a girl can only handle so much dirt KWIM??

Thanks for reminding me!

2008-08-06T01:20:00.000-07:00

So, my MIL is dead. She's been gone for over a year now. It's been tough, I really miss her. She was awesome, one of my best friends. Everyone knows that my mother in law died a year ago. I guess every one except for the telemarketers. Yes that's right, I'm getting phone calls for Dianna! It pretty much goes like this phone call did tonight:

ring ring

me, "Hello"

long pause

me, "HELLOOO"

tm, "Oh yes, uhh is Dianna there?"

me, "Umm, she's deceased"

tm, "What?"

me, "Deceased, she's dead."

tm, "Oh uhhh, uhhh are you her daughter?"

me, "Yes"

tm, "Oh, well we will be in your neighborhood this week trimming trees. Do you have any trees that need to be trimmed?"

me, "No" tm, "You don't have any trees to be trimmed?"

me, "Umm nope, we just have rocks in our front yard"

LOL that really threw her for a loop. Anyway, the only reason I'm even talking to these telemarketers i to tell them NOT to call me anymore. I don't know how in the heck they got *my* phone number and my MIL's name but they did, and it's starting to annoy me. I'd really rather not be reminded by a total stranger that one of my favorite people is gone :-(

This is one of the last pictures I have of us together taken at her 40th birthday party. She had been doing chemo and was bald, so she wore scarves and wigs. Her party was a hat party, so I swiped one of her scarves :-)

Happy Birthday Bryce!

2008-07-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late in posting about Bryce's birthday, but I couldn't let it pass without posting a little something.

Ahhhh my Bryce, toughest pregnancy I ever had and the crankiest baby I ever had. He used to scream from 8pm until 1 or 2 am every single night. I used to drive around, in the middle of the night, so Bryce would stop crying and so JP could sleep. He used to love Thomas the Tank engine, and would sleep with the James car. He went thru a cape phase, tap shoe phase, Peter Pan phase (that one lasted a loong time), and so on....

Ever since before I was pregnant with Bryce it's been JP's plan to take each of the kids on a special trip when they turned 12. It's the "you've become a young adult" trip. So in a few weeks they are off for a week of camping on Catalina Isand. Bryce got new fins and booties for his birthday to use on the trip. (he grew out of his old ones, imagine that!!) I know both JP and Bryce can't wait to go snorkling and hike all over the island.

Happy Birthday Bryce!!

Our new favorite game and more

2008-07-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

Have you played Magic Pen yet? It's an online game that's creating quite the sensation in our house. When anyone is playing it, I hear lots of groaning, gasping and shrieks of "YES!" coming from the general vicinity of the computer.

JP spent 2 hours playing it today. I think he made it past level 11. He's trying to complete all of them. It's super fun :-)

http://games.yahoo.com/free-games/magic-pen

Bryce had a swim meet last weekend. He smoked the competition, LOL. He came in 1st in freestyle and backstroke, and came in 2nd in butterfly and breaststroke. It's funny, in the picture of him doing butterfly, you can't even see the kids in the other lanes. That's how far ahead of them he was! He shaved off about 1 1/2 seconds on each stroke, from his last meet times, which was awesome. I wrote the times down in our meet book, but now I can't find the darn thing to post his times. He has another meet this weekend.

And just for fun, look who's sitting up by himself!?

Busy busy summer

2008-07-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

In my attempt to plan fun things for my kids to do this summer, I majorly overcomitted myself these past 3 weeks. I'll admit, I do that a lot. I'll plan a few things, then plan a few more without looking back at the things I already planned. Then before I know it, I have way too many things for us to do. My big downfall this time was not remembering that our "usual" activities, piano, dance, swim team and speech therapy don't stop during the summer. Anyway, We had a great 3 weeks, but it was so hectic.

Bryce took 2 classes at Gateways, which is a summer enrichment program. He took fencing and cartooning. It was a ton of driving, 4 days a week for 3 weeks. Now I know how the non-homeschooolers feel. It would make me batty to have to drive my kids to school every single day. We are not "good morning, jump out of bed, get ready, race out the door" people! Anyway, he can now safely (HA!) poke people with a 4 foot long sword like thing without getting himself in trouble, and can draw even better than before. It was not cool to show up and take pictures, so I don't have any. ;-)

Blake and Marlie took another round of swim lessons. My master plan is to have all 3 kids on the swim team. I think Blake will only need one more session before I'll have him join. His back stroke is really sloppy. He has such a hard time staying straight, when the celieng of the indoor pool is open! Marlie's swimming is getting much better, but she's still a bit young to do swim team, but we'll see. This round of lessons she swam a 50 (2 laps) freestyle and a 25 (one lap) backstroke for the first time!

Last but not least we did VBS for a week. I totally forgot my camera yesterday, so I don't have pictures of the last day! Marlie made a new friend, that she was very attached to. I talked to the little girls mom, and they go to the church we are planning to go to when we buy a new house. So Mar was thrilled that she will see this little girl again. Blake saw a few firneds from AWANA and Class Day. They had a great week, and I'm happy because it's the end of my insanely busy 3 weeks!

I have 2 new graduates!

2008-06-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

Bryce and Marlie have officially graduated from Kindergarden and 6th grade! Of course my camera battery died during the ceremony, so I had to switch to taking pictures with the video camera which aren't that great. Anyway, the ceremony was lovely. Marlie wore a white cap, she looked to cute! She was nervous to walk across the stage and shake Mrs. York's hand, but she did great. I had to run down the the YMCA and grab Bryce from swim team camp and race him up the the church for graduation. The poor kid was exhausted! But he was so excited to be graduating. We yelled and screamed from him when he walked across the stage and got his diploma from Mrs. York. JP was very sweet and told me congradulations, that I had graduated a 6th grader.

When we started homeschooling back in Fall of 2001 I never though we'd make it this far. We've had easy years and tough years, and lots in between. I'm so proud of both of them :-)

I can't believe that Bryce is now a 7th grader, and Mar is a 1st grader.

A new washer and dryer is humbling

2008-06-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

My dryer broke. It lived a good life, but 12+ loads a week for my family of 6 finally killed it. My washer was close behind. You had to kick it to get it to go thru the rinse cycle. I've been wanting a new front loader set for a while now. JP wanted me to wait until we bought a house and moved before I got one. Ultimately we went to Home Depot and I picked out a new teal LG set. I've always wanted a pretty washing machine :-) It was horribly expensive, but we are hoping the savings in water and electricity will help pay for it in the long run.

When washing machine came, I was so excited. I couldn't wait for the delivery men to leave so i could try it out. I washed every stitch of laundry in the house! The same day that my new washing machine came, my mom called to talk to me about Lupeta's grandsons. For those of you that don't know, Lupita used to be our babysitter. When my siblings and I were young, my mom worked part-time and Lupita took care of us. Now that we are all grown up, she cleans and babysits for other families. She works here in the US Monday thru Wednesday. She goes home Wendesday afternoon. She has 2 grandsons, Elias and Sammy.

In Ensenada, only elementary school is free. You have to pay for what we would consider to be Jr high (but I think for them it's considered high school). After they finish those 3 years of school after elementary, they can go on to trade school. Ironically, trade school is less expensive than the 3 years of Jr high/High school! Anyway, most of the families can't afford to send the kids to the 3 years of transtional school, therefore the kids can't go to trade school or college. When Lupita told us this, it all made everything "click" in our minds. That was why there was such a lack of education and so much poverty. These poor kids don't even have a chance. So 2 year ago, JP's dad and us decided to split the bill to pay for Elias to go to school. Lupita had been paying for it, but it was just too expensive for her to continue to pay for it. When JP's dad died JP and I agreed that we wanted Elias to continue going to school, so we picked up the whole bill.

Alright, so now that you have the background, back to "my mom called the same day I got my washer and dryer." She called to chat, and she told me that she had talked to Lupita a few days ago. Sammy had graduated from elementary school and Lupeta was so proud of him, but worried. Now both boys would be of the age that you had to pay for school. My mom asked her what they were going to do about Sammy going to school. Lupita said that he wasn't going to go next year. :-( She said they couldn't afford to send him.

So my mom and I talked about telling our friends, who know Lupita, about the situation and see if anyone was intrested in contributing to help send Sammy to school next school year. It's really not that much money, it's only $100 a month. I mean *it is* a lot of money, but considering it will change his life FOREVER, it's not that much KWIM? So mom suggested that maybe we could get 10 of our friends to contribute $10 a month for 11 months (they only get one month off school). So maybe that will work.

After I got off the phone with my mom, I figured out that to send both boys to school for the year would be 2,200. It was almost exactly what my new washer and dryer cost. Boy, talk about taking the wind out of your sails. I had been bouncing all around the house like a fruitcake all morning, sooo excited about my new pretty washer and dryer. And for that same amount of money I could have sent 2 kids to school for an entire year. I felt sick.

So fast forward a week. I'm still using my washer and dryer, but it dosen't have the same appeal that it did when the delivery men brought it that morning. I feel jaded about it now, everytime I look at it, I think that money could send 2 kids to school. Don't get me wrong, we still are paying for Elias to go to school, but Sammy...We need to find someone or someones who can pay to send Sammy to school. Maybe someone who didn't need a new washer and dryer. ((sigh))

Guess who's 7 months old??

2008-06-23T19:24:00.001-07:00

Sweet baby Mason is 7 months old!. He's just so cute, that I decided that he needed a whole blog post to himself :-) Mason turned 7 months old last Thursday. He has 2 (SHARP!) teeth that sprouted about 2 week ago. Just a few days ago he started sitting up by himself. He still flops over backwards after about a minute, but that won't last long. He's already eating some solids. I usually feed him at night, (which is a really bad idea since our nights are so hectic), but he sleeps better with a big full belly, so we make it work. 2 weeks ago, I put him on the floor while I made dinner and he started rolling all over the playroom floor! He's gotten quite good at maneuvering himself around the house just by rolling. Does anyone remember who else did that??????

If you guessed Bryce, you're correct! But I learned my lesson (1 year and big bucks toward neurodevelopmental therapy) I'll be sure Mason crawls, unlike Bryce... (crawling was one of the first skills the neurodevelopmentalist made him work on!)

He's such a happy baby. He makes a funny little scrunched up face at you when he laughs. I'm afraid he's going to be spoiled rotten with all the attension he gets around here! The kids love playing with him. I think he's more fun for them now that he "does stuff".

Here's a conversation I overheard while the boys were watching him play on the floor

Blake, "What do you think he thinks about us?"

Bryce, "He thinks your the hyperest person in the world."

Blake, "No he dosen't, he thinks of milk in his tummy."

Marlie often feeds Mason for me at dinner time.

She's a huge help.

Mason's first time in the pool! He loved it.

See that cute little scrunched up nose??

A cat adopted us

2008-06-16T23:12:00.001-07:00

So we've discovered that we are not a good dog family. We liked the dog, but after a while it got old. No one wanted to walk her or pick up her poop. Besides, we discovered that Mason is allergic to dogs. So were pet free for several months.

A couple of weeks ago this cute tabby cat appeared in our backyard. I asked around, but none of our neighboors knew who it belonged to. After 2 days of it hanging around in our backyard, JP came home from work with cat food. By day 3 the kids had let him in the house and named hin Charcoal. I posted on Craigslist and couldn't find his owner. As a last ditch effort, I took him to the animal shelter. 4 days later the poor guy was still there, so they neutered and microchipped him and gave him back to us.

I feel sort of bad, I'm sure he belonged to someone. He was litterbox trained, and before we had a litterbox, he only pooped in the woodchips outside. He comes when you call, and even lets Marlie carry him around like a baby doll. But now he's ours. He got him a little red collar with a bell (save the birds!!). He's pretty cute, although yesterday when he brought me a DEAD MOUSE and dropped it in my living room, I didn't think he was cute.

Happy New Year Blake

2008-06-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

9 years ago today, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. My labor was fast and furious, and we were thrilled that our baby was here. We named him Blake. He quickly started having trouble breathing. After an hour, my midwife called for a transport to UCSD medical center. Several hours later when I was reunited with my baby and my husband at the hospital, my poor husband had the terrible job of telling me that our baby had a cleft palate. Our lives changed in that instant. The diagnosis wasn't terrible, yet very fixable. But my heart was crushed. The next 6 weeks were a blur of feeding specialists, apnea monitors, breast pumps and such. It was nearly impossible to feed him, I pumped every 2 hours round the clock and fed him with special bottles and feeding tubes. He often blocked his own airway with his tongue, we had to be very careful how we held him. By the grace of God I found a world renowned lactation specialist who set us up with a tricky syringe feeding system. If I followed her directions, we would be able to breastfeed after his surgical repair.
Surgery came. Ugh, the worst moment of my life was when I had to had my 6 month old baby off to an OR nurse. He healed, and miracle of all miracles, a month after his surgery he was breastfeeding. A baby born with a cleft breastfeeding!! It was beautiful.
As he grew, he became quite the little personality. He wanted to be a dolphin when he grew up so we could ride on him. He loved wearing his orange motorcycle helmet and his "b" cape. He had more surgeries. He learned to read and then tie his shoes. More therapy. more surgeries. He wanted to know if it was possible to have a super power on this earth. And will there be toys in heaven?
And so now, today, he's 9. Still silly, still strong. I've decided that children with medical issues are tough, they are extra resilient. When things don’t come easy for you, you work harder and inspire others to work harder. When you are different, you are more accepting of others. Blake is the most work I’ve ever experienced in a child, all rolled up into a sweet ball of fun and love.
Last night when we were talking about his birthday, DH said, “Guess what tomorrow is?” and in his squeaky voice he yells “Happy New Year”. So yes, Happy New Year Blake, I love you.

It's recital time

2008-05-31T20:44:00.001-07:00

Marlie had her tap recital today. Parking is a nightmare at Balboa Park on recital days so Marlie and I left 1 hour before she was supposed to be there. JP took all the boys with him, and dropped Mason off with a friend. We got to Balboa Park and thankfully it only took about 15 minutes to find a parking spot. We waited in line with friends until it was time for the girls to be dropped off for the recital. The show started at 1pm, and JP had a taxi picking him up at 2:00pm (to take him to the airport). We really hoped that Marlie's class would dance before JP had to leave. Luckily she danced at 1:50pm! She did a great job, we were so proud of her. She's become quite the pro, as this was her 4th show. I think it's just as much fun for me as it is for her ;-)

All ready to leave! I usually have her wear one of

JP's shirts over her costume so it dosen't get dirty.

Last year it was super hot waiting in line. I learned

my lesson, and this time we brought umbrellas.

Mama is so proud!