October 30, 2014

H is for Halloween

This past week I taught preschool again and we worked on the letter H...for Halloween of course!

We mostly played Halloween games and read pumpkin books and then painted these paper bag pumpkins.

And then I let them decorate (and eat) some pumpkin sugar cookies. This was a major hit!
("Oooo! Sprinkles")

 Then yesterday, we took the kiddos down to Lombardi Ranch. I think they had a blast. The last time we came here Peter was Benji's age and Nora was Benji's age -- and it was just a week or so before Benji's surgery. 

 All the kids loved this firetruck and did not want to leave.
Driving the police car.

Miss Beka entertaining Nora. So sweet!
 My favorite picture of the day with my two littlest munchkins.

 Climbing the mountain of hay.
 The crew with their pumpkins -- Ty, Beka and Benji. It was such a perfect day (90 degrees!) and the kids were so good. At one point Benji turned to Ty and said "You are my best friend Ty!" and then while we rode the little 'train' through the corn field, Benji kept saying "Oh Mom! I love this! This is the best ride ever!"
I feel like Benji doesn't always get to do fun things like this so it was so wonderful to see him so excited. Love these cuties!

October 24, 2014

What's New

So yesterday this happened:
Bringing up the total to 5 teeth now. He even talks with a sweet little whistle now and it's pretty much stealing my heart.

 Also, Nora turned 7 months old and we thought, 'what better way to celebrate than by putting a mustache on our baby!' She basically hated it.
She has also officially started crawling. And is now into EVERYTHING! I had forgotten how much you must watch them at this stage.

 And then because they looked so cute, I tried to take pictures of the kids before church one morning. The kidlets were adorable but not exactly cooperating. Oh well. They are still cuties.
I love the side eye Benji is giving Peter here.



October 1, 2014

Disney..er..not quite Disney

Last week Travis had a conference down at one of the Disneyland Hotels. Since he was gone from sunup to sundown the kidlets and I decided to wait until school was out on Friday to head down and spend the weekend with Daddy at the Paradise Pier hotel.
It was pretty awesome. This was the view from our hotel window:
Since Travis was busy with the conference I decided not to brave the park all by myself and instead hung around the hotel and the Disney boulevard with the kids. Honestly, I didn't feel like we missed out on a thing, it was still so much fun!
Of course, everything is Disney, but it was all so family friendly that we loved it! After being in California for the past few years (not a kid friendly place at all) it was so nice to be in public where everything is geared toward the 4 foot tall and under crowd.

After Travis got done for the night we met up and went to dinner -- where the kids got these awesome balloon creations -- Benji's a sword, scabbard, and helmet and Peter's a mohawk. And then strolled around all the shops. Of course, the kids were over the moon about the Lego store. They've never been in one before and we had to all but drag them away. 




After dark, we headed back to the hotel for a screening of Frozen (which really turned into a hilarious sing-a-long) and to watch the park fireworks.

We decided to take the kids to one of the overpriced character breakfasts at the hotel the next morning which they sooo loved and turned out to actually be worth it. The staff and characters were so wonderful with the kids you wouldn't even know to talk to our kids that they didn't get into Disneyland proper! We were visited by Chip 'n Dale, Brother Bear, Miko the Raccoon and some others I didn't recognize.

I was amazed at how sweet the characters were with the kiddos and how they spent so much time with each one. At one point the restaurant staff even grabbed all the kids to go play games in the aisles. It was so neat! And the buffet....DELICIOUS!! I seriously want to know what they did to those french toast to make them so perfect -- I was all but stuffing them in my purse when we left.
Afterwards, Travis snuck us in the conference so the kids could get more swag (see all the buttons and pins the boys are wearing?) and try out the pilot helmets and ejection seats.

We then hit the Disney boulevard one last time so each kid could pick out a souvenir (Peter a lego of course & Benji some candy -- the kid had like 5 toy stores to pick from and he chose a $5 bag of gummy worms! Crazy kid) and to take this cute picture. Even though you can only see Nora's little leg poking out of the carrier in this one, it's prolly my new favorite shot of us.
And finally we made it to the hotel pool -- complete with awesome water slide -- for a few hours before making the trek back home.
Everyone had a blast and we are so proud of Travis for winning the Ray E. Tenhoff award for the most outstanding paper presented at the symposium!! Apparently it's a pretty big deal, some award alumnus include some dozen or so astronauts, Burt Rutan, Doug Shane (President of The SpaceShip Company) and other notables so who knows what's in store for our handsome man! These are Travis's heroes even of the rest of us don't have the foggiest... Since this conference is a yearly thing, hopefully we'll be able to come back again.