Sushi!

Dan took Emily Grace out for sushi a month or so ago and she LOVED IT, and has been begging to get to go again. The boys started asking as well, so this weekend we took them (I ate teriyaki chicken, I'm not brave!).




Connor was shoveling it in!




Dan, his mom, and the three kids INHALED five sushi rolls, and all three kids were asking for MORE. Connor even started eating the decorative veggie display in the middle. LOL! Won't be a very frequent outing because it was a very expensive lunch, but it's nice they were willing to try something new, and enjoyed it!

Hotel Stay

We stayed in a hotel near Dan's work one night over Spring Break, figuring it would be a nice little get-away for the kids, and one night that Dan didn't have a huge commute to work AND would get to sleep in. I picked one with an indoor pool, and the kids and I checked in at 3pm and pretty much headed straight down to the pool to swim while we waited for Dan to get off work



I hung out in the lounge chair with my iPad and read a book on the Kindle app.

About 15 minutes after they started swimming, Connor came shrieking out of pool saying his throat was burning and his ears were gurgling. I quickly realized I'd neglected to put in his ear plugs. BAD MOMMY! Nothing like having chlorine water "gurgle" through your tubes and down your throat for 15 minutes... I'm still not super used to having to do this now that he has the tubes in his ears! I'd even packed extra ear plugs in case any got lost, and then STILL didn't bother to put them in. SIGH! Dried out his ears, got the ear plugs in, and he was good to go. And I was GOOD and didn't forget for any of the other times we hit up the pool during our stay!


Em wore clothes over her suit down to the pool, but when we had to dash back to the room to get Connor's ear plugs, she didn't want to put her clothes on over her wet suit, so she grabbed up a towel and put on her furry boots (she forgot flip flops) and followed me up to the room. Cracked me up!


Five Guys burger joint was RIGHT across the street, so we took the kids there for dinner. Connor was obsessed with the free peanuts!


He got peanut stuff ALL OVER HIMSELF, and when I commented to him that he was making a mess of himself and the floor, one of the employees walked by and said, "Actually, the whole premise of the restaurant is that people are SUPPOSED to throw the shells on the ground, but sales in our west coast stores were way down until we tried out keeping the floors clean. You should see the floors of the east coast stores! So don't worry about what ends up on the floor; it's supposed to happen that way, and someone will come along and clean it up."

Swan Lake

Emily Grace LOVES going to see ballet productions, and we hadn't yet seen Swan Lake yet, so I bought us tickets this year. What a beautiful show!

We arrived with some time to kill, so we perused the gift shop, and Em tried on some hats and masks:




During the first Intermission, we treated ourselves at the concession stand. Em chose this fancy looking cupcake, and I picked out a brownie (which was heavenly)


Our favorite scenes in the ballet were where ALL the swans would dance together (24 of them!). They were so in sync and really just FLOATED across the stage. It was incredible. I couldn't find a comparable youtube video for the large swan scenes, but I did find this video (posted below) of one of the smaller swan scenes, which we think is pretty spot-on to what we saw. VERY VERY cool, in our opinion!!! (I did NOT take the video, just found it on youtube). I'd be hard-pressed to dance gracefully on my own, let alone joined to three other dancers doing those moves!

Ice Cream Outing

The kids had Spring Break last week, and we took advantage of the extra free time during one of the days to meet up with some besties for ice cream!

The girls' table: (Emily, Madisen, Kaitlyn)


The boys' table: (Cody, Jared, Connor)


The mommy table: (Me and Stephanie)


Emily and I got my all-time favorite, the pink peppermint candy kind, and Jared and Connor got a crazy green and purple kind with little bits of something in it (Rockin' Poppin' something or other... LOL). We were all happy with our choices. :)

School Journal Entries

Connor's 2nd journal from First Grade came home recently. As with the first journal, I had a grand ol' time reading his entries. I just get the biggest kick out reading his thought processes and deciphering the phonetic spelling. TOO CUTE! I photographed a few of my favorite pages to share with you.

I'll translate each entry in the captions of the pictures:

My favorite food is raw broccoli and dip and the ultimate worst food to me is chicken


I love my mom and my dad and because they let me eat candy and because they are nice to me and Jared and Emily


It is important for kids to exercise and lift weights and run around and use your imagination and be creative and go to school that is very important and read and play and eat healthy food (I think we need to work on using periods!!)


Good friends shouldn't do mean things to other people especially you and your friend and if they do don't be their friend and stay away from cats (stay away from cats?!?! He kills me!!)


If I had diamonds and gold and rubies and jewels and a hundred treasure chests I would give it to the poor people in the world and the people that do not have homes (bless his heart!)


I want to learn more about math and telling time and reading and plants and science and bugs and everything so I can be a genius


There was another one I thought I photographed that talked about if he had a magic wand, he could clean all the toilets in the world and also make things move. hahahaha!!!

A Sunny Nap

I like the way my dog thinks! Except that should be a beach, not my kitchen floor. *grin*

Remodeling

We're currently sprucing up the house a bit, in order to make it look nicer (and hopefully SELL QUICKLY). We ripped out some ugly wood paneling from within the entryway, and I got to work mudding and sanding.

WHAT A MESSY UNDERTAKING!!

Emily Grace took this picture with my cell phone


All the holes and tape lines mudded down one of the two long walls


Time to sand! Promised Dan I'd wear the respirator he got me...


VERY MESSY


Didn't think to have a way to clean up my feet before walking to answer the phone (or tell Pandora Radio YES, I'm still listening...), so I had a pretty little trail of white footprints


Messy ME


The picture doesn't show very well just how white my hair was from all the dust. Pretty funny!!!


In the end, I had a nice smooth wall, ready for spackle (which has since been done as well, but I didn't take any pictures of that)


May have taken me five times longer than a professional, but I'm pretty dang proud of my work. *grin*

Quote of the Week

"I don't want to go to the dentist today, because I HATE having to brush SUPER good. I just like brushing regular." -Connor

Oh Dear...

I'm pretty sure teeth aren't supposed to come in looking like this...


Connor is starting to have a funny little lisp because of the crazy position of that front tooth. SIGH!!

Thank goodness for antibiotics, because I got my first ever round of pink eye two weeks ago, and it's as horrible as it looks


My lower eyelid started to hurt when I'd blink on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning, the very rim of my lower lid was a little more pink than normal (where the eyelashes grow out), and both top and bottom eye lids felt tingly. No stinging or burning, just tingly, like your foot when it falls asleep. My eye had never felt like that before so, suspecting Pink Eye, went into Prompt Care. The doctor wasn't ready to confirm pink eye since there was no itching, no goop, and nothing really pink yet (just faintly along the rim of my lower eye lid). He gave me an eye exam "just in case", and since I didn't do very well with my right eye, the doc agreed maybe I was getting pink eye after all. He prescribed me some ointment, but suggested I wait to use it until I saw some more visible symptoms, and gave directions to come back if symptoms worsened and the ointment didn't work. I took the above picture two hours after I filled the prescription. CRAZY how quickly it got bad!

My next picture would have been described: "I'm pretty sure belly buttons aren't supposed to look like this", but Jared refused to let me photograph the suspected return of the umbilical hernia he had as a baby. It's not nearly as big as it was during his first year of life, but there's a definite little bulge, with a definite little "squish" sound when you poke at it. It really grosses him out that he has it, but it's not hurting him, and it's not overly large (nothing anyone would even think twice about, really, unless you're his MOM, and then you can tell something is a little "off").

We like to keep things interesting in this family, can you tell?!?!

Jared's swim ribbons

I've been meaning to take a picture of Jared with all his swim ribbons, but finally got around to it when he needed to make an "all about me" collage for school.


We figured a picture of him with his ribbons (along with a picture of some swim goggles we found online) would be a good way to show that he enjoys swimming and spends a lot of time doing it! He's been in four meets and has 12 ribbons. Not bad!

He even gets to move up into the next level of his swim club starting next week. He's already been swimming with that level once a week for the last month or so, and the coach told me he should have moved Jared up a lot time ago. Better late than never, I guess!

Easter Egg Hunt

I hard-boiled 36 eggs (12 for each kid) Saturday in preparation for the Easter egg hunt we had planned for the kids. We dyed them first thing Easter morning (Saturday got away from us!), got some baking started, and then I went out and hid 34 eggs (two cracked while being boiled, and although they were still edible, I didn't want them out exposed to who-knows-what if we hid them outside!).







Emily and Jared started finding eggs right away, but Connor was doing a lot of running around without a whole lot of REAL looking. They eventually found 32 eggs, but heck if we could find the last two. I went around looking everywhere I'd hidden eggs and couldn't find the remaining two either. The one I didn't actually look for myself was the one I'd hidden by the hot tub, but asked the kids if they'd found that one, and they all said "yep!". WELL, I finally wandered over there myself, and sure enough, an egg hidden there... After a good 15 minutes of searching for the final two eggs and only finding one, we gave up and were heading back inside when we noticed this: (ignore the dirty mat! I need bang it out badly!)


I'd sworn I'd hidden a blue egg on a big rock in the garden, but none of the kids claimed to have found one there, so I thought maybe I'd moved it elsewhere. Turns out our black lab moved it (into her STOMACH!).

I had the kids line up after all the eggs were found so I could take their picture, and look who's sniffing around... I think we're lucky she only ate ONE!

Chickens

Our friends/neighbors just put in a really nice chicken coop and got a bunch of chickens. My three kiddos and a good friend who was visiting us for the afternoon last week got to spend some time holding the chickens and hanging out. They had a BLAST. Especially Connor, who just LOVES animals!



Yes, I'm aware it looks like Connor is all but strangling that chicken. He'd had a better grip on it and then I said they could put the chickens down and then said, "WAIT!" because I realized the picture I'd taken hadn't worked properly (came out really blurry somehow).

They have some new little "meat" chicks as well. This one has three black dots on it's head, so they've been calling it "Domino". LOVE IT!


Jared was very hesitant about picking up the chickens at first, but then got really brave and was enjoying himself. Our little friend had ducks at home for awhile, so had zero qualms handling the the chickens. Connor followed her lead within seconds, and Emily wasn't too far behind either. Connor's already asked numerous times when he can go back again. :)

Home Improvements

When you buy a fixer-upper, and then live in it for 13 years without doing any fixer-upping, you find yourself a little stressed when it's time to move and you have to get it all done at once so it will sell (hopefully) for a decent amount.

That's about the time you lean on friends and family for their various skills and abilities and general willingness to be helpful...

Here's Jon and Wade, helping replace the rotten wood slats in the front porch


Jon also replaced (and will soon be retrimming them) four doors in the house that weren't functioning properly.

My friend Jessica came over and helped me scrub the oven, an indoor grill (we never used it, but it was in disgusting shape when we bought the house and we didn't know what to do with it), and all the cubboard fronts. She'll also be helping us decide what to plant in the garden beds so the yard looks a little nicer.

I have my dad lined up to come replace the broken faucet in the main bathroom, and he's done some work on the garage door as well.

My Uncle Jeff is coming over this week to finish replacing the windows and a sliding glass door.

I've even expanded my own skills by pressure washing the front porch for the first time (with plans to do the patio out back as soon as I can get my hands on another pressure-washer to borrow). I got really wet and dirty, but the porch looks great!


There's still a lot to be done, but we're finally making progress. Too bad none of it got done where we'd get to enjoy any of it ourselves before moving!