Skele-fun!

Saturday we went once again to the free building craft at Lowes. This one was glow-in-the-dark skeletons. Ryan and Zach joined us and Ryan was so boy - he refused to read the directions so what happened... he started doing it wrong and had to back track even thou I was trying to tell him the correct steps the whole time! Boys!

Zach liked hammering a little too much. We realized after 2 weeks of having the boys fight over whatever Nate brought home that it was best to bring em both and have 2 of whatever.

Hunter and Haley made skeletons with us too!

Painting with pudding - Round 1

Today some friends came over to have some fun getting messy. We finger painted with pudding that I dyed with food coloring (I used white chocolate pudding cuz it was closer to white than vanilla)

The kids were very dainty in their painting. Ewan used a paintbrush, Nate used 1 finger, even the 1 and 2 year olds were pretty clean. Kaitlyn was the only 1 who really got both her hands into the pudding but it was still just her hands. I was anticipating hosing off the whole patio and instead had very little clean up.

Here is Nate showing off his "pointillism" technique.

Zach & Nate's masterpieces, suitable for framing no?

Painting with Pudding - Round 2

Remember what I just said about "little clean up" - forget it! After most kids left Nate wanted to paint w/pudding again and since Hunter missed it I thought it was a good idea. Hunter was really into it! I was glad cuz it help Nate get more into it, which of course made Zach into it cuz anything big brother does...

Here I painted Nate as Anakin Skywalker (from the animated Clone Wars where he saves the Nelbaln warriors... yes I'm a mom of boys I know this stuff)

By the time they were done, the 3 oldest had pudding all over and even in their hair.

Good times.

Dream a little dream...

Today me and the boys went with Nana to Disneyland! Here are the highlights:

Zach was rockin the shades during the bakery tour, Nate rode a dolphin.

Mrs Neise this is for you: Nate was singing the Sammy the Seal (???) song while riding the dolphin. He kept singing "Up up up up up. Down down down down down" over and over. It was cute!

You cant pass up the Heimlich ride (especially when the wait is nothing, which is good cuz the ride is about 30 seconds long)

We finally made it to Toy Story Mania, these 3D glasses really do look flattering on everyone - not! (that's the reason I didn't put up a photo of me in the glasses!) Zach freaked on the ride, I had to yank him out from under the lap belt and hold him against me everytime we moved (yet I still beat mom's score with 92,000 points - oh yeah!)

Why the post title? On our way out of the park we were winners in the Year of a Million Dreams Giveaways! No we didn't get an overnight stay in Walt's apartment but we each got these nifty trading pin lanyards with 2 special pins. Hey, there were free!

The Peanut Connection

I bet most of you don't know that we are related to Charles Schulz (well, me just by marriage, the boys by blood) Charles Schulz is Ryan's Grandpa's cousin (on his mother's side) Recently, Ryan's grandpa was given some copies of old family photographs from the Schulz museum in Santa Rosa.

This is Schulz with Ryan's Great Grandpa:

This is Ryan's Grandpa as a baby (with Great Grandpa):

And this is Grandpa with Schulz:

Neat eh?

If you build it...

Today we met up with a bunch of friends to build firetrucks at Lowe's Build and Grow Workshop. It was alot of fun, a little more complicated than the pirate ship but still cool.

We had a little firetruck race afterwards, it was brutal! Merrick ended up on the floor!

For me the best part was on the way home Nate told me "I like building with you mommy." Ahhh, so sweet! I feel a little selfish not letting Ryan take Nate so I think I'll have him do the Home Depot 1 next week (Besides, who will will chat with all my friends if I'm not there?) See ya all at the next one... skeletons!

Free ice cream, baby!

No this isn't deja vu. We had more coupons for free ice cream so we indulged again today. This time mommy picked out the flavors :)

Stuff on the wall

Hooray! I finally finished the birthday countdowns I wanted to do for the boys! Inspired by my hottie friend Jeska White, I wanted to make countdowns to help the boys understand when their actual b-days are (instead of all week long) so I got these index card holders from the dollar bin, printed the numbers and letters, added stickers (shout out to Uncle Joel for hooking us up w/the cool skull stickers!) then attached velcro on each side, hung em on a ribbon and viola! Nate gets skulls and Zach gets surf - by the way, it's tough to find boyish stickers that dont have cartoons on em. Each box will have a small little something in it. Here is the number side
and here is the letter side, it just happened to work out that we had the perfect amount of number to spell "Happy Birthday!" and "HappyBirthday"
the close up: Yeah that's right, we rock the skulls around here!
I also finally got around to hanging up our family portraits that Danielle took forever ago at the Spring Mops Fundraiser. I wanted to put all 3 pictures together instead of adding 3 more frames to our "full of pictures of ourselves" walls. But custom framing is expensive and no one pre-made what I needed so I got a "float" frame and put them together myself.
Another new thing on the wall (in my bathroom) is Nate's Prize Chart. If you know Mindi then you know she likes charts and during a "disciplining" discussion we had a our Mops table (Frontierland Rules!) she brought up charts so we're givin it a try. I just feel like sometimes N8 has no motivation to behave or do what I'm asking him, so we'll see how it goes. The biggest thing I hope to accomplish... getting him to eat! Seriously this kid never wants to eat anything! So he gets a star just for eating w/o whining and crying.

We've got cabin fever

Nate was out of school for a week with a cold and now Zach's got it. So we've been spending alot of time at home being very silly. I kept meaning to take pictures of all the running around the house in silly costumes, spiderman masks, matching undies (the boys not me) but I only took these. Nate is finally back at school and hopefully we can start hanging out with friends again :)

Goodbye Tacoma, it's been real

This will be the last time most of you see Ryan's truck. We are selling it! We had 2 cars that could maybe pull our trailer with hitches and decided to be safe and get 1 that definitely would pull our trailer. So after looking at trucks, then SUVs, then minivans, Ryan found the best deal on this:

It's a 2005 Kia Sorrento we got a good deal on. It's a stick and if I can put up with driving a stick and being a mother then I'll drive it and Ryan will drive the Avalon but if I go crazy, I'll swap back. Now we just need to find a new home for the truck but it's a good truck and apparently it's worth more than we thought so we shouldn't have a hard time selling it.

And many more...

In celebration of Mexican Independence Day (I mean my B-day) my mom and I took the boys to Disneyland to renew my pass (Thanks Mom and Dad!) Well as far as B-days go, this one wasnt so great. It started 20 minutes into my B-day at 12:20AM when Zach woke up (teething) and didnt go back to sleep until 3AM! Then when we all got up in the morning to go, Nate had a major fit cuz I put his cottage cheese and applesauce in the cottage cheese container instead of a purple bowl and that just ruined his whole morning, everything was a struggle after that. Then we got to the park and even thou it was supposed to be 85 it felt like 105! I could feel the sweat drip down the middle of my back and it was only 10:30! Then at lunch time both boys refused to eat lunch and just wanted to climb all over the booths.
The whole day wasnt bad, we did have fun at Disneyland, especially when we went over to the puddle park, I got a dozen free tortillas from the tortilla factory for my B-day, Ryan got me some pretty sunflowers and took me on a date to BJ's and I get to get to go back to Disneyland for another year (minus select dates of course) And if you remember what last year's pass looked like http://lanecrew.blogspot.com/2007/09/castup-ketchup-catch-up.html, you can see that this year it turned out much better.
But alas, the day ended with me and Nate both at the beginning stages of a cold. Can I call in sick to mommy-work tomorrow and stay in bed? :)