Family Christmas party and cookie baking!

Thursday was a busy day for us as well since it was my birthday, Ben's holiday performance, Sam's holiday performance, and both Will and Ben had their school parties that day as well. Brian and I both went to watch Ben sing (he was so adorable!) then went to help out at his party. After that, Brian went to watch Sammy sing at his school while I picked Ben up from school. I'm the room mom in Will's class so I went to his school in the afternoon and gave the kids their holiday party. We played Bingo, decorated sugar cookies, played pin the nose on the snowman, made a reindeer candy cane craft, and of course, ate junk food! That night, we went to an Italian place to celebrate my 31st birthday. All in all, a great day.

Our annual Leonard family Christmas party was Sat. and we all had a great time visiting with family and friends. Santa came, the kids did lots of fun crafts, and best of all, got to play with all of their cousins.

Today is Christmas Eve and we spent the morning making cookies for the big guy. Santa that is!The kids did the ones decorated with sugar by themselves and I did the ones that are iced. The kids ate the last chocolate in their chocolate advent calenders and are so excited about tomorrow!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We have really been getting into the Christmas spirit here at the Leonard house. We have our (fake) tree up and decorated. We are talking about getting a real one next year. We have garlands and wreaths hung. We have a rudolph car costume on my van. We watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with the kids last night (had to fast forward through a little bit of it, but the kids thought it was hilarious!) As I type this, the men folk (except for the one napping in his crib) are all outside stringing Christmas lights and putting up the light up train that they bought for outside. I wanted to go all out this year! We got the big, old school colored lights too because Christmas decorations are SUPPOSED to be gaudy, people!

This morning we put on some Christmas music and decorated a gingerbread tree and nativity scene. Last night we baked decorated cutout cookies and will do some more later on. I tried a new recipe, but nothing beats the old recipe my mom used to use. The cookies are light and crispy and lemony, a little different from traditonal sugar cookies, and nothing quite says "Christmas" to me like those cookies do (kind of like Brian and the Christmas tamales that his family makes every year)! So I will have to make some before Christmas because I have not gone a single year without them in the 9 years since I have been out on my own. I have also made a batch of fudge with more to come, and made homemade peppermint marshmellows. Baking is one of my favorite things about the holidays.

I love family traditions and it's really important to me that we create our own with our kids so that they have things to look forward to, that we only do around this time of year. One that happened sort of by accident, is that we go out on Christmas Eve and look at lights, then we come home and eat take out Chinese food. Then we put out milk and cookies for Santa, read The Night Before Christmas, put the kids to bed, then wait for Santa. I like having a quiet, laid back evening before all the craziness of the next day.

I hope all of you are having a magical holiday season and enjoying your own family traditions!

Cool eggs!

A friend of Brian's at work keeps chickens and she has a lot of extra eggs and offered us some. The different types of chickens lay different colored eggs, so here we have green, brown, and brown speckled. The kids thought they were really cool! The yolks of these eggs were also darker yellow than the ones you find in the grocery store, but they tasted the same.

Sammy is three!

We've been so busy lately that I forgot to post about Sam's birthday! Sam turned 3 on the 14th. The weekend before his birthday we went and stayed in Indio, which is near Palm Springs, with Brian's family (it was us, Tim, Wendy, Cory, Carson, Zukie, Laura, and Kathe). We had a little party for him there so he got to eat cake and open presents twice (my mom came in on Monday and stayed for the week, and Sam's birthday fell on a Wednesday). We also got to go swimming over the weekend since it was so warm in the desert. We all had a really nice time just relaxing and hanging out.

Before we left for Indio, I went to Costco to pick up the cake. I put it in our fridge until it was time to go, and Sam wasn't too happy when I told him that we needed to save it for later that night and couldn't dig into it right away. Brian and I were in our bedroom packing and in walks Sam, covered in red icing. We ran to the kitchen and the pictures you see are what we found!

I also included a picture of the flurry of hands helping Sam to open his birthday presents. We had a hard time getting the other three kids to let Sam open his own gifts!

Sammy said "I love you" for the first time today!

And it was to Ben! Ben laid his head on my lap when we were doing puzzles and said that he had a stomach ache. Sammy looked over at us and said, "I luv ooo Ben". Awwwww, brotherly love! Kind of makes up for all the time they spend fighting!

So the kids want a dog

The boys have been asking us for a dog for months. We can't get a dog where we live now because the landlord won't allow it, so that has been an easy excuse. We are however, in the process of trying to buy a house. As soon as I mentioned that to the boys, they immediatly thought "dog". I am not too keen on the idea of getting a dog because I know that the responsibility of walking, feeding, and cleaning up after the dog will be primarily the grownups' responsibility. We are considering getting one when Sam gets a little older, so that I only have to clean up the poop of one person/animal. Yes he is three now, and no he is not potty trained. Then we also have the issue of boarding the dog or finding someone to watch it when we go out of town which is often.

I did feel a little guilty about the dog issue when Will and Ben were in the backyard trying to teach the cat to sit and jump up on his hind feet!

Ben lost his first tooth!

Last week, Ben lost his very first tooth! He was very excited, coming into my room at about 5a.m. to tell me that his tooth was gone. He said it just fell out on it's own, so it's probably lucky that he didn't end up swallowing it! He was thrilled when the tooth fairy left him a "gold" one dollar coin. The reason this picture looks kind of funny is because Ben was upside down on a chair when I shot it. That was the only way he'd let me take it. Typical Benny!

Happy Halloween!

Yesterday we finally got around to going to the pumpkin patch and picking out our pumpkins. Better late than never! In our defense, we had plans to go to Tanaka Farms, a really cool local organic farm and take the pumpkin tractor ride, pick veggies, visit the petting zoo, and pick our own pumpkins, but that got cancelled due to the fires. So yesterday we visited Pumpkin City at the mall instead, went to the petting zoo there, rode a terribly overpriced "car" ride, and picked out our pumpkins. I did get a few cute pictures of the boys.

We ended up using templates that we printed off the internet to make Blues Clues, Sponge Bob, and alien faces on our pumpkins. With the alien one, we used a kit that came with these little lite brite type pegs that you pound into the pumpkin and the "candle" that you put in it blinks. It's kind of cool. It looks just like those lite brites we had as kids, except with a pumpkin.

We went trick or treating with Will's friend from school and another little girl. They all had a great time running from house to house and collected about 10 pounds of candy. We will probably end up sending some of it with Brian to work because that is just WAY too much candy!

Fire

Just wanted to let anyone who might be wondering how we are doing that we are fine and the fires are staying a safe distance away from us. It's smoky out and the kids have not been able to get out to play at recess and there is ash all over the backyard, but I can't see flames from where we are at. You can see a thick cloud of smoke over towards Foothill Ranch, and Sam's school is closed. Some of the houses in Foothill Ranch were evacuated but those are higher up in the hills.

The boys are in the paper!

Well, the online version of our community paper, that is. This Sat. was the annual Fall Festival at Heritage Hill here in Lake Forest. It's a fun community event that we go to every year. We always see lots of people that we know and the kids have a great time doing crafts, playing games, and collecting candy in thier costumes. Here is the link to the story in the paper. http://www.ocregister.com/news/vampire-historical-live-1901031-robinson-half If you click on "view more pictures" you can see the pictures of Will, Ben, and Sam. I believe Will and Ben are number 8 and Sam is number 10.

Super Mario Bros.!

Here are a couple of pictures of the boys in thier Mario and Luigi costumes made by Grandma Zukie. They got so many compliments on them last night at the party we went to! We are going to our town's Harvest Festival today so they will get another chance to wear them before Halloween.

Cupcakes for Ben's class

This afternoon, Ben and I spend some time making 36 cupcakes for his class for tomorrow's party. He cracked the eggs, mixed the batter, put the cupcake tins in the pan, did the sprinkles, and put the ghost rings on all of the cupcakes himself. I thought they turned out pretty cute!

Pet turtles

We are now the proud owners of two red eared slider turtles. We were walking around China town with the boys and Will, who has been asking for turtles for awhile now, saw all of these little boxes with 2 turtles each in them. They were 5 bucks and I knew I'd have to end up buying it a bigger tank, but I thought "what the heck" and let him buy the things. Not a very well thought out plan, as it turns out. I went home and researched these little guys and learned that they grow to between 8 and 15 inches and need a 20 gallon tank at the smallest. They also need a strong filter, and a basking area with a heat lamp. So, $300 later, the turtles are happy in thier new habitat. Will is in turtle heaven.

Vegas Vacation!

This past weekend the boys and I tagged along with Brian to set up for a convention in Vegas. We stayed at the Hilton and the kids and I visited grandma Kathi on Saturday and went swimming in the hotel pool and played in the arcade on Sunday while Brian was working. We were there for three days and had a great time!

We met up with daddy at night and took the kids to Bennihanna for dinner on Friday night, Planet Hollywood on Saturday night, and Rainforest Cafe on Sunday night. On Saturday afternoon we went with Grandma Kathi, Bob, and Uncle Kevin to Freemont Street in downtown Las Vegas where we had lunch, saw some performers, and saw a really huge fish/shark tank surrounding a swimming pool with a water slide going right through the middle. The waterslide was made of some sort of plexiglass so that when you went through, it looked like you were in the fishtank. The boys wanted to go back to our hotel and get our bathing suits!

Family hike

On Saturday we went on a family hike at Casper's Park with our playgroup and Jodi from Earthroots Field School. She takes children and thier families on nature hikes, teaching them about wild, edible, and medicinal plants along the way, showing animal tracks along the trail, teaching about the animals that live there, and just having a great time outdoors. The kids loved it. We didn't call it a "hike" because for some reason that turns them off. We termed it an "explore" and they were very excited, asking Jodi questions, collecting rocks and sticks, and helping some new friends to build a fort out of fallen tree bark and branches in the clearing where we stopped to eat lunch. Normally a picky eater, Will even sampled some of the prickly pear that we picked on the trail. We hope to make this a monthly family activity.

Camping fun!

We just got back from a weekend camping trip to O'Neil park today. We decided to try a little overnight trip and it was great! I had reservations about such a short trip, thinking that maybe it would be more trouble than it was worth, but we condensed our camping gear and were able to pack and unpack in record time. We went with a huge group of friends from one of my playgroups. There were 15 parents and 14 kids ranging in age from 7 to 22 months! We had 4 or 5 sites, so there were 2 families per site. The kids all got along great and had a blast! I was a little worried about how it would all work out with that many kids, but it was so awesome that we were all talking about doing it again sometime. Brian had a really good time with the dads too.

If anyone would like to schedule a trip just let us know because this place is about 15 min. from our house and really nice. They have bathrooms and showers, hiking trails, and a playground for the kids. It's also very close to civilization in case you need to run to the store. It's also very easy to get reservations and a nice little weekend trip. We're thinking of going from Friday night after work to Sunday morning sometime since it's so close.

I wish I had taken more pictures and I *really* wish we had gotton a group shot, but as you can imagine it was pretty much chaos with 14 kids running in different directions. Lining them all up for a picture was just not going to happen. I did manage to snap a shot of Will with the baby lizard he caught and one of Sam and a friend.

Ben has a loose tooth!

Yesterday, Ben got an apple out of the refridgerator, bit into it, and told me that I must not be brushing his teeth very well because one of them was hurting. I asked which one and he said it was a bottom tooth. I wondered if maybe it was loose, and sure enough, it was! Now I know why he has been asking that I brush his teeth lately. He was saying that he thought he wasn't doing a very good job by himself. Turns out that tooth was just bothering him because it was loose. I'm going to have another little toothless grin pretty soon!

I actually did it!

In my seemingly never ending quest to shed the last 30 baby pounds (can you still call them baby pounds when your "baby" is almost three?) I have taken up jogging. I have never, ever in my life been a runner. Even when I was a skinny little high schooler, I would get winded trying to run more than about a minute. So I had my doubts as to whether I could actually do this or not. I found a running plan on the internet called the "couch to 5K running plan" where you work up to jogging for 30 min. straight over a period of 9 weeks. I am currently on week 5 and have just completed a 20 min. jog with no walking in between! I'm now pretty sure that I will be able to do 30 minutes in another 3 weeks or so.

p.s. In case anyone is wondering where the pictures are over the last couple of posts, unfortunatly, Ben spilled orange juice on my camera cable and it isn't working anymore. I will try to get out to get another one a.s.a.p. so that you can all share in the kid cuteness.

September 11, 2007

Today was Sam's first real day of preschool. I got a little teary in the car driving away after dropping him off. My last baby is a preschooler. How did that happen? When did that happen? The time has gone by even faster with my last baby than it did with my first, if that is possible. I'm still blown away by the fact that I'm the mother of a 7 year old 2nd grader!

I am so grateful that I have been able to be at home with the kids all of this time. Today I went to volunteer in Ben's Kindergarten class. He was thrilled to see me and ran up and gave me a big hug. He absolutely *loves* Kindergarten. He is already making new friends and was talking to some other boys in his class during snack and playing with them on the playground.

Now a moment of remembrance. Every year on Sept. 11, I, along with every other American, I am sure, think about what happened on this day in 2001 and how the world will never be the same. Everyone has a story to tell about that day. Everyone remembers where they were when they heard of the horrible events. I was sitting at home alone with Will, who was 15 months old at the time, having breakfast. We hadn't turned on the t.v. or the computer, so we had no idea what was going on. Brian called and I asked him what time his flight was going to be coming in since he was scheduled to fly home from Houstan that day. He said that he wasn't going to be coming home today and to turn on the t.v. What I saw on the t.v. looked like some scene out of an action movie. People running and screaming on the streets of New York. The footage of the twin towers being hit by the plane. It was very surreal. I can't remember how our conversation went after that, but I remember walking around in a daze for the next few days. The playgroup that I had when Will was a baby got together at a park on a day that we didn't normally meet, just so that we wouldn't have to be alone. For the first time ever, I really felt like I had a shared history with every person I saw. We all had this tragedy in common. We will never forget.

More back to school pictures!