This past weekend our family made yet one more trip to Orlando, so I could run my 2nd Disney Princess Half Marathon, and the boys could experience the early mornings and fun people watching with me. We stayed at Walt Disney World’s newest hotel, a value resort called The Art of Animation Resort, and we visited Sea World with our dear friends the McNabb family.
We repurposed the Incredibles costumes we wore last September, which was our plan all along. Unfortunately, my plan was for temperatures to be in the 50s like it had been most of the previous 5 years of this race. Instead it was quite warm.
We had a fun day today. I got to spend time with each of the boys at their schools. Then we went out to dinner at one of the very few restaurants that the four of us can agree on. Unfortunately, when you order sushi while everyone else ordered off the Chinese food menu, I had to get my dinner to go. That’s okay…it was all yummy!
Dave got me a charm for the Pandora bracelet I got for Christmas.
This has been an insane holiday season! But let me just toss up some You Tube videos showing off the kids. These were all taken with our new camera…with the telephoto lens zoomed in as far as it would go. I promise I have so much more to write about this week, bear with me, … Read more
Today Timmy got his first pair of glasses. We knew this was coming for a long time. He’s like his father in so many ways: appearance, his comedic nature, and many other “youngest child” traits. It took three visits to the eye doctor this year to get everything right, Timmy would complain about his vision, and … Read more
Jacob enjoyed helping me review a book for the blog last month.
This post is about Jacob. Some folks know — some folks don’t — that Jacob has been our more reluctant reader ever since he learned to read. His little brother plows through books pretty quickly, while Jacob reads more slowly and more deliberately.
Jacob had been sticking to book series that are heavier on the illustrations: Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Big Nate, Origami Yoda, Adventures of Tin Tin, etc. Timmy loves those books also, but had no problem reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series while in 1st grade. Having Jacob read every day for school had been a challenge. In 3rd grade he had to set reading goals and it was pretty tough working with him to meet those goals.
It was the saddest thing, not being home for my boys’ Halloween. I did my best to decorate the house — complete with a fresh batch of tree ghosts — but was away by the time my sons had their school Halloween parties, and other Halloween events (such as Jacob’s first boy-girl birthday party with … Read more
I’m going to play catch up on some day-to-day life blog posts this week. I’ve made two trips to Omaha in the past 2 months and that gets pretty exhausting, I put a lot aside just to keep the family caught up with groceries, Cub Scouts, piano lessons and household tasks. So let me post … Read more
Jacob turned 10 years old earlier this month. We had a small birthday party for him at the house, and Jacob enjoyed playing with some of his birthday gifts. Thanks to everyone to recognized his birthday with nice gifts, and thanks to those who took time out of their busy schedules to celebrate with us … Read more
Our friends and neighbors, the Scotts, took our family out on their boat last weekend. It was so kind of them to offer; their boat seats 4 adults and 2 kids pretty well, but no more passengers than that can fit, so we had to find a weekend that didn’t involve other visitors. We here … Read more
Our family likes to go to the beach on weekends. It’s Dave’s and my little indulgence on Sunday mornings these days: we head out around 10am and come home in time for a late lunch around 1pm.
You never know how the Gulf is going to behave on a given trip to the beach. Sometimes there’s a ton of seaweed, sometimes there are jellyfish, sometimes the water is really deep at our favorite spot, sometimes it’s really shallow.
On our last trip, two weekends ago, the seashells were out in force and we enjoyed collecting several.
The kids have brought home buckets full of small seashells before, and they’ve mainly sat in our garage awaiting an idea. This time the kids begged me to help them do something more fruitful than have them sit in the garage.
So I offered to buy the kids a vase and they could fill the vase with the shells. I went to Walmart and took a look at the glass vases in the craft/candles section and thought to myself “That’s going to take forever”.
I found a hurricane glass and chose a sand-colored candle to add to the glass. The kids filled the hurricane glass with the shells and it now sits in the bathroom to match their surf-shop bathroom look.
First we washed the shells and sat them out in the sun to dry.
