houseboat and Leo Carillo

Just wanted to take a minute to post a few vacation pictures. We went on our annual houseboat and camping trips over the summer. Yes, I let the boys dye their hair red and blue, that isn't just your eyes going crazy!

Some house pictures

Some updates on us

It's been so long since I've blogged that quite a few things have happened since I last wrote. The biggest thing is we finally bought a house! We've been here for about 3 months now and are just thrilled. After renting for 10 years, we are so happy to have a place to call our own. The kids are still able to go to the same school, which is nice.

Sam just turned 4, which brings me to our next big accomplishment in the last year- he finally peed on the potty! I have been working with him for over a year now to try to get him to do it and he finally decided tonight that he was ready. We made a big deal about it and wrapped up some bubbles and a ring pop since we've been telling him that if he did it he'd get a present. Woo hoo!

I just found out today that Sam has qualified for the special day preschool through the school district. This is a program for kids with mild to moderate delays. Sam has been in speech therapy since he was 2 and we don't think it's quite enough to give him the boost he needs. This program is 5 days a week, 5 hours a day, and is geared towards kids like Sam who need early intervention to get them off to a good start. I've heard great things and we're nervous and excited for him to start. What will I do with myself for 5 hours a day? I'm suddenly finding myself out of a job;).

Will is 8 and in 3rd grade. He's doing well and liking school and his teacher. He has two of his best friends in his class this year. His cousin Carson has also moved to Lake Forest and is also in 3rd grade at the same school, which has been really nice for both of them.

Will, Ben, and Carson are all in boy scouts this year. Will is in the same den as Carson- they are bears. Ben is a tiger. They both won 1st place in the Raingutter Regatta.

Ben is almost 7 and in 1st grade. The beginning of the school year was a bit of an adjustment to staying at school all day, but he has transitioned really well. His reading is really coming along. What a difference a few months can make! He was struggling a bit with his sight words in K, but is now sailing through the lists and reading the stories in his anthologies with no problem.

No Baby Sister

I was putting the kids to bed tonight and Will informed me that he wanted a baby sister. Some of you may remember that when I told him I was having a boy, when I was pregnant with Sam, he was furious with me that the baby was not a girl. Sam overheard what Will said and looked a little worried and said, "No baby". I said, "No we're not having anymore babies." He turned to Will and said, "No baby sister. Sorry!" This is the kid who we have trouble getting to string 3 words together and who is in speech therapy. It seems he becomes quite articulate when it comes to important matters, like talk of usurping his baby position in the family! Sam still insists that he is a baby, and when I turned away from him for a second to look at the other two, when I was singing his bedtime song, he turned my face to face him when I sang the word "baby" in the song and made me say it again.

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!