November is for Change!

Wow! So much has happened in the last two months. The last thing I posted was from the beginning of October when we went on our family vacation. Since ...

• I am one year older and one year wiser!
• My sister moved in - two months later moved out
• Our basement got finished!
• I let go of some painful influences in my life! Yipee me. On the road to recovery.
• I took this last term off from school to regroup, heal and balance myself back out.
• Our basement is finished!! So excited.
• I got a promotion at work!
• Went to the in-laws for some much needed R&R for the BEST holiday EVER - Turkey Day, people or didn't you know. :)
• My mother came to town to visit and stayed with us - that's enough to put life upside down for a bit.
• My husband finished a (successful, we hope; will find out in a couple weeks) semester.

AND ...

• I'm pregnant - HA, JUST KIDDING. I think the above is quite enough for one short time period.

Unfortunately, my sweet albeit absent-minded husband "misplaced" our camera cord so we can no longer extract our photos from our camera to our computer. These are the moments I wish digital was more intuitive! I mean, doesn't it just KNOW something like this will happen??!

So, to keep this post short. We are alive, kicking and well. I did want to post something in honor of a dear friend who said, "your blog never says HOW you ARE! Just what you are doing ..." I've thought about that quite a bit and until I have more guts to really vomit all over the keyboard, it is best that everyone thinks that nothing is but ROSES- leave me to my delusions, guys. I have tried to post truth about "HOW we ARE" in the past but it is either interpreted wrong or comes out wrong ... for now - I'll concentrate on the FUN we are having. Maybe that is better for a journal anyway, right? Who would want our grandkids to know just how crazy, nutso we really are. It'll be bad enough when I can officially call myself a crotchety old hag. Now I am just crotchety. Hehehe.

Happy holidays, everyone. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. God Bless.

Family vacation!!!

Since meeting my husband we have made it an annual tradition to visit San Diego, CA for our family vacation. This year we made the trip in October which ended up being perfect since we planned on visits to Disneyland and Seaworld. I hate amusement parks because of the crowds, long waits, rides that are so not worth it because they are old, rickety and scary and last a shorter time than the wait ever was. However, in October, the lines are only a blink and Disneyland was AWESOME. The rides were amazing! Detailed. Elaborate. The rides and the park as a whole made it seem the expense of the entrance ticket was well worth it. As much as I had a distaste for amusement parks, it was obviously because I had never been to Disneyland! LOL. We were invited to Disneyland by dear, close friends/neighbors that were only an hour away from where we were staying. We met with them at opening time and didn't leave until well after closing time.

At Seaworld, we got to spend the entire opening-closing day with my best friend! It was so great to see her after a year! We finally got to talk face-to-face and the kids got to see Aunt Kris!

BEACH DAY!!! What is the point of going to California if there aren't going to be a couple beach days??!! It was the BEST vacation ever. :)

Whew! Took a while, but it's posted.

My husband's OLLLLLDDD!

SEPTEMBER 29th, 2009

Not really, but his surprise 30th (!!!!) turned out GREAT! I don't keep my surprises very well. I get so excited I HAVE to tell. Oh, I keep everyone else's secrets just fine, it's the I-know-what-you're-getting-from-me surprise that I suck at!

So, what I did this year is put together a 'double date' with my husband's brother and his wife. That way I had something to plan and to talk about. Of course, the surprise birthday party was supposed to come with a surprise BBQ for his gift, but I gave that away weeks early! Darn. Hey, 1 out of 2 isn't too bad, right? At least the main event wasn't spoiled!

The gift ....

My husband's dear parents (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!!) drove up to surprise him, too. They stayed at a nearby hotel and was here to surprise my husband as he came home from work Saturday afternoon. His brother came up, too. He stayed with us so we had to go in on another lie (white lie, for a good cause, of course) to explain his sudden appearance at our house. We had my husband SO FOOLED! It was priceless. Here's some pictures ....

Dad, feeding my beggar child. She was so funny. She ate everything on her plate, plus whatever anyone else would give her. In total, I think she ate THREE hot dogs and TWO hamburgers! I hope it's a growth spurt.

Can you see his fear!? We all hid in the garage so he'd HAVE to open the garage door and see us. Luckily I locked the front door because that's where he went first! He hates public speaking, but I didn't think a surprise party would be a big deal - oops. He almost passed out! :)

Most of his family and mine were able to come! Neighbors and friends came, too!



His cake - rubbing it in as much as I can. :)

So many kids were there, it was so much fun for all the cousins and friends!

Cousin's, friends, family! It was so much fun. HAPPY BIRTHDAY SWEETHEART!!

I've created a ... RUNNER!

Ha, you tohught I was going to say MONSTER - only on bad days. :D Instead, I've created a runner!!

(Can you see him?)

Our city had a 5K run for domestic violence which we walked. However, "we" was only my sister and I strolling our babies along while Dylan ran most of the way! Amazing. I didn't know he had it in him! At the end of it he said he loved it and had so much fun. Two weekends later there was a marathon which had a Kid's 1K during it. Dylan ran almost the whole way again.

(Dylan's the one crossing the finish line)

For me, it was torture! I haven't run in A YEAR! I was so sore all weekend and half the week after. At the end, Dylan was given a "FINISHER" medal! He was so proud of himself. I was so proud of him! It was such a great experience for him. I can't wait to do the next one. I hope he keeps having fun!!

Wow, I suck at posting pictures

I just went back through the last few months and I barely, if at all on some posts have any pictures. People like pictures! Why am I not posting them? Other than the fact that the pictures are all on my camera and I just never take them off. Also, I don't take a lot of pictures (like I should! My bad!!). So, here are some ... if I can make it look ok ... not like my previous post (weird!).

So, here's our summer ....


Walks in the park,



St. George visits, with and without my adorable niece



(Me) making friends with old family friends,




Hikes in the canyons,

Outdoor adventures from here to Las Vegas, NV

And coming up ... beaches, Legoland, Disneyland and Sea World in only THREE weeks!! CAN'T WAIT!

And here's my Dyl-pickle ...

Locking himself up with the dogs, ummm, ok ...

Playing in our lil' sandbox

Exploring (again) new toys

Taking it upon himself to get down family night games

Of course, homework

Lastly, here's Aba ....

She actually sat there and posed until I came back with the camera! HA!

Now she's a tiger

Always sleepy

Yes, that is a puzzle box!

Formatting

Ok, does anyone know how to format these posts well? I don't. Anyone willing to school me? lol

Reminiscing preschool

The end of our preschool and I finally got the pictures off my camera!

Science was my favorite. Dylan's too. We had fun exploring outside, inside, all sorts of things we take for granted. Here are some examples of some science projects we did. We explored animal habitats!

Animals who live in the forest

Animals who live in caves

Animals who live at the pond.

They aren't professional, but we loved 'em. Took months to convince Dylan to take them down when the lesson had passed, expired, rotted and finally was buried! I had to do it when he wasn't home. I don't think he noticed. Makes me wonder ... lol.

A new year

It has been 15 months now since we made our decision to homeschool. We've been through the "pilot" program as I like to call it, one full year of preschool and now we are in Kindergarten. I am still teaching as much as students in his grade are taught (for instance, during preschool school was only three days a week for a couple hours each day and now Kindergarten is five days a week for only a few hours a day). Thus far, homeschool has been the best decision we have made for our kids and we hope to be able to homeschool continuously. We are still asked if we will continue to homeschool and if we will homeschool all our kids. My answer: yes - as long as:

1. the kids want to
2. I am able to
3. or until either the school works with their skill level or they are caught up (or vice versa) with the grade level they are on

I am so excited for this 2009-2010 school year. We announced to Dylan that he is now in Kindergarten. Same as his friends, same as his age should be. He is WAY excited. Now he tells everyone he is in Kindergarten! I love that energy and he still has such a passion for learning. So far, my fears that he'll hate homeschool or temper-tantrum that he isn't in traditional school have been subsided ... for now. I think it's the age and the fact that we engage one-on-one and we still do fun things, explore together and keep things interesting. However, for me, I like to just make sure he feels like he is still a part of something special! SO, we made sure he got to do all the traditional things:

We labeled his scholastic progression (Kindergarten).

We went back-to-school shopping.

We went to the dentist and the doctor for yearly check ups and immunizations (had to be done anyway, but I remember doing these things, specifically at the start of my new school years).

We fixed up our school room to refelct his school year more definitively.

We have an art wall (not shown), our school books bookshelf, our weather chart where we discover the weather each day and the seasons, school rules and schedule, letters, days of the week and numbers chart, world map and little lesson reminders. Also, to help learn the months of the year and dates, we make a calendar at the beginning of every month which we post on our school room door.

He is way excited for this years subjects, too. We are still doing math, science and language arts, but we get to add history and SPANISH! Math, science, language arts and history are typical K classes - low scale, not so in depth as a fourth grader might have, but FUN and full of exciting new things to learn. We chose to add Spanish because Dylan has asked us for the last fifteen months if he can learn Spanish. Instead, we learned Sign Language - not the whole language, but enough to communicate on a small scale. (Thank you Marne for jump starting us!!)

After a year, he was still asking to learn Spanish! I don't know Spanish and he has no interest in learning French, so I finally broke down and bought a program that will teach both of us - together. To find out his real enthusiasm, we started with the numbers. Just 1-10. But to see if he was interested in picking it up and sticking with it before we spent the money on a program (brilliant Darin! Thanks!!) It worked like a charm! Dylan learned 1-5 within a couple days and was able to label not only the English with the Spanish, but the quantity of something with the correct number. We continued with 6-10. We are both excited!!! Granted, this little test is VERY little in comparison to the WHOLE language, but he has stuck with it and is still excited. He asks everyday if we can do Spanish next after each lesson.

Breakfast books

Like a good do-be I went to get all my months of pictures off my camera to finally go through them, post them, whatever them and ... my camera dies. LAME. So, another post without pictures. I'm excited about this post, though.

A couple months ago I realized I don't read anymore to my son. :( Sad, I know. However, since my son started reading at three, I didn't know what to do. He read everything he could. Life went on and we slowly stopped reading everyday together. I realized this and my heart was sad. Our schedules are typically pretty busy, especially the more independent and self-sufficient my little boy gets, I tend to add more and more to our schedules. As I realized we didn't read much anymore, other than the school books for lessons and such and I missed that time with my boy. I thought, "When is a good time to squeeze in reading non-school books together?" The answer was AT BREAKFAST!! At breakfast we sit and eat together anyway, just talking about the nights we had. How easy would it be to just add a couple books to read together during that same time?

Now, almost every morning Dylan grabs a couple books he wants to read and we read them together (in between bites). Sometimes Dylan reads, sometimes Mom does. Either way, it has become a GREAT addition to our routine and it didn't change much of what we already do. Abigail gets to have books read to her and Dylan gets so excited for breakfast asking, "Can we have breakfast books today?" I love it, the simple pleasures.

What time is it?

One of these mornings I'll wake up in a daze and ask "what time is it?" as I gaze at the half dead husband drooling on his pillow to my side with (thanks to Mom) a pillow over his head. Unfortunately, that won't be for - what, another 35 years until retirement, minus 3 kids (at minimum), plus 18 years until they head out of the nest ... well, you understand the math. HOWEVER, until that time, I'm enjoying the ride!

Now that I'm done catching up with everyone, I suppose I'll catch up, too. We've had a great summer. Stressful, unbalanced, lazy, fun. We haven't gotten to have a lot of weekends or nights or days together. I'm so much better of an at-home mom during the summer, places to go, weather to soak up. But, I went and got a job at the brink of summer. No problem, makes the heart go fonder.

In July we made two trips to St. George. One for the Fourth of July which we got to spend in St George and Las Vegas with my best friend. The other with just my sister enjoying a girl's weekend getaway hiking, resting, playing.

At the beginning of August the four of us were FINALLY in the same house for the same 2-day weekend! That almost NEVER happens. Either Dylan is at his one-dad's or Darin is working. Neither have the same schedule. So, for the first day in a long time we were together, we went swimming and enjoyed our time together. Of course all my pictures are still on my camera and thus, no fun pics of children smiling and parents happy. :D Those to come!

Where to start?

It has been a long time since I've posted. Where do I start? So much has happened. We'll start with the kids. That's the fun part anyway.

Dylan is well. He's enjoying, neigh, LOVING his days with his best friend, Tyler. He's enjoying the last couple weeks off of school. He's finally done with soccer. He's so funny, he says he wants to play soccer, but he gets out there and dances or goofs off or tells the coach, "I'm so tired, I need a rest" from what? Lol. However, he has made some show of promise. He runs fast! When his head is in the game, he gets back to the goal to help keep the ball away. He seems to get the idea of the game. But his age? Attention span? Whatever, makes the game very unpredictable. Each season we ask him what he wants to play. He says he wants to play soccer - we'll see if he wants to next season.

Abigail is great. She is learning the art of dirty looks and temper-tantrums. With lots of love and redirection, though, I have hope. She is a great walker, totally clumsy. She often walks into things or falls down, inner ear problem, maybe? She says (and signs) lots of words: ball, bottle, bye, shoe, food, up, hi, I love you, more, milk, all done, dad, mom, brother, etc. Of course, these words are not completely articulate, but her garbles can be distinguished when she points and when she says it back to you. She also knows where her nose is, eyes are and ears are. She climbs stairs and slides down them! I just love this age. It is so fun. She runs away as fast as she can and it looks so funny and awkward, but way cute. She has learned to dribble a soccer ball from Dylan's soccer games.

Darin is having WAY too much fun this summer. He is so funny. He has no school, ended last semester wonderfully, passed all his classes and is just high on the excitement. He has been a bad influence on my homework productivity this summer. However, he's having fun with his games, his projects, his kids and keeping up with small house projects. He's a wonderful man and husband and even though I only get to see him about an hour or two a day, it has been great to see him with so much less stress.

As for me ... I'm working on a certain zen-factor.

All in all, that is what is going on with us. We are trying to enjoy the time we have and the summer sun (come out, come out where ever you are).