Oh, What do you do in the Summertime...

We have been trying to keep ourselves busy enough so that we do not get bored, but not so busy that we are worn out and are not getting the "break" that we need so badly from a strict routine. It has been (mostly) a fun challenge. At the beginning of the summer we may have had too much on our plate. Now we are looking forward to some time away from home for a little change of pace.

The beginning of the summer brought swimming and diving lessons. The kids are getting better at diving. Here is Katie attempting a front flip for the first time. Not bad!

Here is Christian getting ready to make his approach on the board...Katie has just gotten out.

Here is Katie doing a back dive...

And here is Christian just being happy as he is getting out of the pool.

They had a lot of fun. Katie wasn't sure she liked how much her body got smacked as it entered the water. But she thinks it might be worth the price to dive. We will see when we try again next year. Christian loved it, but isn't really getting it quite yet. But he is definitely not afraid of swimming in 11-13 foot deep water. He thought it was funny to swim across the dive tank when his swim class (not diving) was supposed to just be getting comfortable with the idea of being on the edge. (Picture, class on one side, Christian swimming to the other. :) Christian is a ham, so is still lovingly tolerated by his teacher. I stepped in to help and told Christian in front of his teacher that he can get thrown out of class if he didn't listen. He stopped.

We have had a lot of people over to swim in the pool and have invited many more. (Open invitation, if you haven't already received one). And that has kept us very busy and given Katie and Christian a lot of people to play with.

The reading program has been really good as it has helped us stay on track with having minimal reading at the very least. We seem to go in spurts depending on how much time in the pool we have had and probably how much time on the computer has been eaten up by their new webkinz. Luckily we already had time limits for "screen time" otherwise it might have been even rougher than it has been to kick them off. I have had to help them out "earning" kinzcash for their pets too. It has been fun. :). All sorts of ways to bond.

Hope your summer is fun. If you are too hot, come on over.

Happy 6th Birthday, Christian!

Today is Christian's 6th Birthday which is almost too hard to believe. As the kids grow and we need to get new shoes or new clothes because they just don't fit anymore, I will tease them and say "If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times, you are not allowed to grow. Do I need to give you another time-out?". They always chuckle, "Mooom, we can't stop growing. That's how God made us." It is too cute. So, apparently I do not have the time-out power on growing up. So, onto a few Birthday facts about Christian.

• Christian's number one form of play is "imagining". He does not need any toys to do this. You can hear him in his room bouncing off of his bed and his walls as he "flies" around his room. He won't even tell me what he is imagining. Sometimes I wonder why I even buy toys and then all of the sudden he will haul all of them out and play with them too.


• He loves Robots and spacemen, particularly Buzz Lightyear. This year he got the mid-sized Robosapien for his birthday. He received a less expensive model this last year at Mike's work party and just loved it. Sometimes when he is imagining it will be sitting in the middle of the floor as he runs around it while it flashes its lights and warns of enemy attack. When he saw the Robosapien (and it was on sale, yeah!) he said, that is all I want mom. I asked him what else he wanted as there was still some money left in the budget. He kept looking at that box and saying, "That is all I want mom, the robot, that's all.". Very cute. Luckily I got a few ideas before we found the Robosapien. (Here he is with his new Robot since we celebrated on Saturday.)

• Christian just graduated from Kindergarten and is going into first grade this next year! Yeah. He is an emerging reader and speller. The other day he found his name tag from school and decided to write "big boss" on it. He thought it was a great joke.


• Christian loves Lego's. Or, at least the Lego.com website that we have found games on.


• Which means he also really loves the computer and the games we find on the Internet. Yes, his mom is to cheap and/or to wary of being able to control the usage of a Wii. I have password on the computer, so when computer time is up, so goes the password too.


• Christian loves theme parks. What kid doesn't. Living closer to Disneyland has been fun. He has learned about LegoLand too, and we are hoping to go soon. He loves to be outside and loved going to Philmont with the family last year. Here is a picture of him on Western Night trying to rope a "calf".

• Christian has a very infectious laugh. When he watches movies he will just get the biggest belly laugh. It makes you laugh just watching him.


• Christian has lived in three states already in his young life. Oregon, Idaho and Arizona.


• He is a force to be reckoned with on a scooter. He prefers it to a bike, although we are working on the whole bike thing too. We don't want to buy another one with training wheels.


• He is a little fish in our pool. It only took a few times in the pool to start diving and swimming across the pool. (Diving lessons this year and bottom is treading water in our pool.)

• He loves his Daddy and is very excited to play with him when he gets home. (But, he is really a momma's boy, don't tell his dad. I am enjoying it while I can.)

Happy 6th Birthday, Big Boss, Christian!

Here is Christian at the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game we went to for part of his birthday. We had free tickets we shared with our friends the Ostlers. At this point, he really just wanted to be at home. He is hoping that the meditation will take him there.

Celebrating the end of school...

To celebrate the end of the school year we went and got grossed out at the Arizona Science Museum. The kids had a blast. We got to shoot things into noses, sniff and guess where the smell came from (way too real), slide down stomachs and generally learn about some "gross" things our bodies do. They also learned about some gross animal "stuff". The have a brand new planetarium too. To be honest, I never saw a planetarium show before. This was really cool though. The kids and us parents had a really fun time!

Christian got a chance to feel what it was like to become poop.

He got to race a dung ball up the hill...

We ended the day at Chuckee Cheese and got to let our brains pretty much melt there for awhile. This video is really funny. Notice Christian up at the front dancing his heart out at first to "earn" more tickets. He doesn't even know Chuckee throws the tickets. Katie is there to grab them up.

Okay, this is not from the Grossology exhibit. It is just too cute not to post. Katie is quite the dresser. Black shirt with her camouflage capri's, ruby slippers and hot pink underskirt (supposed to go under another skirt for dance). I love her. She is my kind of girl. She is loving the freedom of summer.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Today is my dad's Birthday. I am sure he will not see this until later as my cousin is also getting married today, but, Happy Birthday Dad! So, off with a few facts about my dad:

• My Dad, like my mom, is the middle child. Only he is the middle of three boys, where my mom is middle of three girls.
• When my father was a child, his dad made him wear boxing gloves to fight his brother at least once. He likes to make people think he is a lion, but he is really a big teddy bear under any huff that he does make.
• My Dad loves to work with wood. He has had all sorts of wood working tools some of which have been passed onto my older brother.

Here is the Shop Smith that he still has. Mike went out to help him fix something "really quick" one day over Thanksgiving and instead the spring was lost as it shot out of wherever it was. We won't say whose fault it was, but lets just say, my Dad may have thought he had not found the right repair partner. They found a part that would work after a "little" searching at some stores. It was a quick fix after that. A few months later Mike went to pick up his dry-cleaning and the owner was working on a machine that he had been struggling with for hours to get the spring in. Mike went over and helped him get it in instantly. The owner was amazed. So, Mike learned from my dad. I asked Mike if he got a discount for helping out...he didn't. But he felt pretty awesome about it.

• He built the house we lived in in Pennsylvania. While he was building that house, I was allowed to go up with him on the top floor (we lived the basement). I was only two at the time and had always followed him and stayed away from the dangerous areas. One time that I went up with him I stepped into the insulation that was covering the unfinished stairwell. It was not solid and I fell head first to the tile floor below. They rushed me to the hospital where he gave me a blessing and miraculously I was just fine. (Okay, stop snickering, I am just weird naturally.) Needless to say, I don't think I was allowed up there again until there were no places to fall through.
• He loves to play games. He really enjoys playing games when he wins. Many times we would hear "I don't want to play that game, I never win". Which was followed by him beating all of us the majority of the time.
• He is very mathematically and computer-ly talented. His job has always involved computers and because of that we grew up with computers starting with the ones that basically looked like a keyboard hooked up to your television set.
• He loves his kids. Whenever one of us would get married he would be fairly put out that day and be a grump at times. Being the fifth child in the family I figured out what was going on. I let him know that I knew it was hard to let me go, but he better put on a happy face about it and not be grumpy about losing me to my Mike. He just chuckled. He is just so dang cute when he gets sheepish. :)
• He has a high pain tolerance. Really quite impressive really. This was not inherited by me.
• When one of the grandchildren prefers grandpa to grandma, he not so secretly relishes that fact. He positively glows. He loves it when the grand kids only want to be held by him or have asked, "Where is Grandpa?", as soon as they walk through the door. He loves it.
• His torso is longer than average, which Christian totally inherited.
• If you get Dad on the phone when Mom isn't home or is busy making dinner, you can really get quite a conversation out of him. The kids really like to talk to him too. Christian especially, will out of the blue say, "I am going to call Grandpa now".
• He really likes to travel and go on cruises with my mom now that all of the kids are out of the house.

Dad, I'm so glad you pulled through your surgery last year and are still here with us. What a blessing to still have you here with us. Katie and Christian regularly ask how you are doing and I know they love you very much. Happy Birthday! I hope it is wonderful.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Okay, today is not actually my Mothers Birthday. It was Monday the 12th. However, I forgot my new goal of at least saying Happy Birthday on my blog to my parents and my little family. So, a little belatedly, a few facts about the person I call Mom.

• I adore that woman and so do my kids. They know how to call her all by themselves and do it often. I think this is called following my example, because...


• I call my Mom nearly everyday.


• When I had my babies, she came and stayed with me for two weeks each time, which was invaluable. (Thanks Dad for supporting her in that!)


• She will kill me for this, but I think it is a near miracle having had seven kids, I have only heard her swear once. It was my fault. I was a teenager, but it was at that moment that I realized that the issue I was bent on being heard about was not in her control.


• She is middle of 3 girls born of good parents in California.


• Her sisters are Jean and Barbara whom we call Jeanie and Barbie.


• My Mothers name is Sandra and she goes by Sandy.


• She married at 19 and had 7 children. She thoroughly enjoyed having them, although each child came after a while longer than the last. Considering that the first two were 11 months apart, that was bound to happen.


• She loves chocolate and onions, but they don't love her. However, as any good woman, she still partakes of chocolate...and onions.


• There was hardly a day she didn't cook for her brood of 7. We did have leftovers and for years, on Sundays, we would have pancakes for dinner.


• She is 6 years younger than my father and gave the engagement ring back to him 2-3 times before she finally accepted. (I can't remember if she refused 3 times or refused twice and accepted the third, but the three is in there)


• She got her degree in elementary education.


• She beat cancer a few years ago which we were beyond grateful for.


• She is one of my best friends and I love her for her loving nature.

Happy (late) Birthday Mom!

Mike Meets Some Family

Mike left for San Diego on Tuesday morning for one of his annual Boy Scout National Meetings. On the way, he stopped for the night in Ramona at his cousins house for the night. He finally got to meet Marlene Marchese Robershaw, his second cousin once removed. Or in other terms the daughter of Mike's Grandpa Joe Marchese's cousin John Marchese. Yes, I had to look up how to say it technically right. He was very excited to meet her. When I met Mike he was nearly family-less. He is the only child of an only child, his beautiful mother Nyla who has passed on, and didn't know much of his extended family growing up. We found her Marchese Website last fall but didn't think it was really his family because his grandfathers information was a little off. We finally contacted Marlene because several things that he remembered did match. She was ecstatic when she realized it was a match and some of her information on Grandpa Joe was incomplete. We were blown away and have been thrilled ever since.

Here is Marlene and Mike at her lovely Ramona, California home that she shares with her wonderful husband Ron. Even though she had never met Mike face-to-face before, she invited him and his coworker/friend Derek to stay at her house last night. That is faith!

Thank you Marlene for doing all that genealogy that helped us reconnect with family again! The kids and I can't wait for our turn to meet you and Ron soon!