Happy Birthday Grandma

Grandma turned 91 this summer. We celebrated in Carpinteria. This lady is amazing, I don't think she has every missed anyones birthday-ever! She always sends a card and some money or a little gift. And she has alot of grand and great grands. I have enough trouble just getting it together for my four kids!

Carpinteria

This town is what you'd think of if you want to go to the beach for a summer time get away. Lots of people on the warm sunny beach, the water is warm enough to swim in. The weather is warm, but not hot. You walk up and down the streets to get food or look at antiques. We have been there four times.
Santa Barbara is right up the road to the north, what a beautiful place. If I could live anywhere that would be one of my top cities.

Rinconada Pool

Go to this pool if you have little ones! We do not live too close to this, but it's worth the trip for the sun and the pool itself is so entertaining. The pool is shaped like a flower with five petals-each petal is a different activity. A slide, a mushroom, water squirting bikes. fun fun fun

The other pool has a diving board, a lap area, and an open area-plenty of space for the big kids to do their own thing too.

We all got sunburned to some degree. Next time do more sunscreen applications for sure!
(no picture-where is that camera?)

Birthday girl

This is a few months late ......

What kind of cake do you make a 12 year old? I told her it would be a surprise-so I chose a butterfly. Smile.

Bowling

The younger three and I went bowling to use their free bowling pass. This is cool-we could have bowled every day all summer for free, but in actuality, we bowled 4 times. Which was plenty for us I think. Once again preteen did not want to go, but I forced. We picked up a friend on the way spur of the moment and all was good.

By the 7th frame RC was ready to go home. With a little help he made it through all ten.

After a bag of skittles and a game of air hockey. Get all the fun in now before school starts.

Another baseball game

This time it is the San Jose Giants-minor league. It was Yahoo night at the stadium, so we got free tickets from work. Got there about 7:20 and found seats at the top with a good view of the home plate.
MC gave RC a whole cotton candy to himself. Then MC left and RC was on a sugar high. I felt like the umpire because I was in between four kids who like to argue during a baseball game. 9th inning couldn't come fast enough. After the game Yahoo sponsored the fireworks-MC didn't get there in time so he didn't light any fireworks off.
Stopped by 7-11 to get a slurpee on the way home.

San Francisco Giants

http://www.printroom.com/ViewGalleryPhoto.asp?evgroupid=0&userid=sfgiants&gallery_id=1216873&image_id=34
Took the train to the San Francisco Giants game. Playing the LA Dodgers. I saw alot of blue and white-lots of dodger fans. We had tickets and found out they were standing tickets. The kids were mad about that. I took RC to play in the kids area for a long time. About the 6 or 7 inning we found some empty seats and the girls found their friends to sit with. It all worked out fine. A really good and close game at the end- tied up and played an extra inning.

Six Flags

Get everyone in the car, even a preteen who doesn't want to go to a theme park!?! Allow extra time for that tantrum.

Arrive at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, with all kids excited for the rides, yeah, the hour drive proved to be good to put all in a good mood.

Ride as many rides as possible, the lines were not too bad on a Friday.

Put a three year old on "Tony Hawk's Big Spin"-he didn't know what hit him. But was smiles at the end. (He did pass the height requirement, obviously) I am still upset at my husband thinking about that.

Watch a huge whale do tricks--it's odd, don't you think? But an amazing animal.

Eat a funnel cake at closing time-we were all starving-yum. Then on to Round Table Pizza for dinner. oh, yeah, call ahead so the pizza is ready and they make a mistake --duh! we end up waiting for our 2nd pizza just as long or even longer than if we ordered there-"fast food" restaurant people drive me nuts!

Sew you think you can sew?

I remember why I don't sew as much as I'd like to. It's because everytime I make something, the pattern says you should make this size, and the end product is too big. So when making this dress, it has four darts luckily. When I finished it, I wanted it more fitted so I just re did the darts. It worked. I was wanting an Ann Taylor dress that had big huge red poppy print-but this was the closest thing I could find to big huge flowers. Cute for summer.

That dancing guy

Have you seen this video? Well, at Yahoo (hubby's work) this dancing guy was there. He travels all over the world and does this little dance at some most impressive landmarks. Now, Yahoo probably isn't a landmark, but somehow he came to Yahoo to make a new video. I wanted to go and watch them make a new dancing video with all the yahoos. But instead I took the boys and we were in the video too. Ha-funny. I don't know when the video will be posted but I guess he is making a new one. I can't wait to see myself dancing silly on film. Luckily it will be non closeups.
For the Q&A portion I asked him to tell us about his dancing moves..he said he doesn't have any moves and that is all he does. He said it was much more fun to have people dancing with him from all over the world than just dancing by himself.

Have you heard of this?
Do you have dancing moves?

Happy Birthday to my love!

I have to post about Mike's birthday. The backstory is that is travels to all the Hard Rock Cafe's that he can. I think he said he's been to about 70? wow, ok that is alot of rock n roll, not to mention souvenoiur tshirts and glasses. So in honor of that I made the cake into the logo. The sign in the background says "you rock" to go along with the "rock" theme. That is a foam board with red christmas light spelling the words. But I made a mistake - I did the words on the wrong side of the board, it was supposed to be on the other side, but I didn't figure that out until too late. See, I wrote the words on this grey side, poke the holes, and then realized that the words were backwards on the nice white side of the board. Now next time I will think before I poke, ha.

Do you have creative birthday celebrations?

Happy Birthday to me!

What do you do when your birthday falls on a Sunday? You go to church , duh! Well, I didn't tell people because it's weird. And I had ward council meeting before church so I just made muffins for that. That was my birthday present to myself and everyone who attended the meeting. suprise you get breakfast! yeah! I never eat breakfast when I have an early morning meeting cuz there is no time.

After church CMC had a meeting at the stake center for the youth council. Then we got home and a little later went out to dinner at TGI Friday's. oops-well at least we made it a family activity so we will be "forgiven". ok that's it. oh, and me hubby told the waiter it was my birthday so they sang the embarrassing song and gave me some ice cream. Isn't it fun to have the whole restaurant looking at you? ok just once a year.

On the way home we stopped at the beach. I love the beach. And it is so convenient to just jump out on the drive home. Nice. The sky was a little foggy already. We played a game of tag, AMC stubbed his toe really badly so that ended that and we went home.

All in all a good day!

A catholic yard sale

The local catholic church had a big yard sale today. You know it's catholic when everything has "your first communion" written on it. ok not everything but alot of stuff.

I did find RC a pair of shiny black church shoes and "children's place" pants -yes!
A crock pot, emroidery thread, thread, ipod accessories, keds baby shoes- brand new in the box.....all for 8.75.

The rest of the day was grocery shopping and getting AC and CAC new shoes to use this summer.

Singapore?

I am totally needing to refresh my geography skills. Mike went to Singapore for work and I am still trying to find it on my map. I know it is in the Indonesia and China area of the world. ok, ok I found it.

Then the kids are quizzing each other about the state capitals. I drew a blank on many of them! oh my gosh --how embarrassing! So AC pulls out the place mat/states and capitals to refresh us all-thank goodness. My brain is turning to mush this summer....that's what I always tell my kids when they are watching too much tv or internet or video games.

Do you know your capitals?
Is your brain mush this summer?

Rob Schneider and the band

Our school district has a music foundation sponsored by Rob Schneider. You know him from SNL and all those silly movies he is in with Adam Sandler. He contributes money so that our schools can have music programs, like band and choir.

He came to the all district band concert this year. Colleen got in the background of this picture-she plays the flute and was second chair, right in the front row. Rob signed autographs and took pictures with all who wanted one. He is great!

That is CAC to the side waiting for an autograph.

Girls camp fundraiser

A yard sale-for the girls to raise money for girls camp. Our garage is full of stuff that people from church brought over. We did this last year too. I got smart this time, I have a salvation army truck scheduled to pick up all the left overs on Monday.

We made over $400-with only three YW working, they will all have plenty to put towards camp. Glad that is over, and I don't want to do it next year.

Losing your marbles!

Primary has been a little out of control lately. The constant talking, interrupting, getting out of seats and wandering around....ok, so in an effort to have a more enjoyable lesson we are using the marble jar.

If the kids are noisy or doing anything they aren't supposed to do, the we start taking marbles out of the "CTR" jar and putting them in another. On a given Sunday (which we probably won't tell them when it is) they could earn a "surprise" if there are more "ctr" marbles than in the other jar.

This worked! The kids picked up on it immediately. I think the visual and being able to hear those marbles plink down in the jar gets their attention. I don't know how long it will last, but for now we are going to use this so the leaders won't "lose our marbles" ha!

Cream puffs

Thanks Betty, Crocker that is. I made cream puffs to take to a baby shower. They came out lovely. The recipe from Betty Crocker book, sounds complex, but it really isn't that bad. Time consuming to make your own homade custard filling-but it is delicious.

I put little pink flags that said, "it's a girl" on each one just for a bit of decoration.