Our trip to San Diego!!!!!

This past week was soooo much fun for our family! We spent 5 days in San Diego visiting family and we cannot wait to go back! We stayed with Rickey's Uncle Mark and his wife Dori, and their 3 kids who are all super close in age with our little ones. These kids did not go to sleep before 10:30pm every.single.night. we were there!!! They were just having too much fun for a regular bedtime and I must say, they loved every second of their past-bedttime shenanigans. ;)


We spent the 4th of July with them and they live in the most awesome block with neighbors that are super friendly. They even have a 20+ year tradition to shut down their street and do a pot-luck and the kids of the neighborhood put on a "bike parade" and they had yummy food and PLENTY of drinks for the whole neighborhood (even at nighttime they brought out HOT yummy coffee and baileys and other "adult additions" for coffee; that's my kind of party! ;)


Uncle Mark and Rickey are VERY competitive with each other so besides playing xbox games EVERY night, they played so many other games at the block party and watching them get so competitive was absolutely hilarious!!! From ping pong to bean sack toss (even a little indoor soccer!) they were at each other and even asked us wives to get in on the action and team up to do the water balloon toss game! (I ended up not playing with Rickey due to someone else wanting to play with him more but whatever...) it was still funny to see how competitive they got to even want to do a married team match against each other.


We also did 2 days in Sea World and oh.my.gosh. it was super fun!! The kids were loving every single second of the shows and we got to see Dolphins up close and put our hands in the water to touch them! We saw dolphins, penguins, polar bears, beluga whales, of course Shamu killer whales, sharks! Sea world has a few kiddy rides and a HUGE play structure and we spent plenty of time there too. it was a great time and even now at home the kids keep asking when we will go back and see the animals again.


Saturday we all had a chill day just hanging out in the backyard enjoying the sunny San Diego weather. We filled up the kid pool and while the kids swam the adults soaked up the sun, chatted up and sipped on grape soda vodka drinks :) yuummmmm! Alyssa and her oldest cousin Ryen put on a "tv show" and were crafting for hours to put it together.


Every night they all cuddled for bedtime story (read by Aunt Dori) and on the last night the two girls decided to read a story by themselves and it was SO sweet to see them take turns, each reading one page.


We absolutely enjoyed every day we spent and can't wait to go back.... lucky for us they are planning a trip up to the Bay Area in a few weeks since Aunt Dori also has family in SF and we will meet up with them again then.


I took WAYYYYYY too many picture but I'll try to not go too overboard posting them here... key word here is "try." So bare with me people.

4th of JULY slide show... yes there's lots of pics.. sorry I tried to cutdown but couldn't LOL

2nd week of summer

This week was not as busy as last week, but we still had good times :) Scooter playdates with BFFs, haircuts for us gals, swimming playdates, and our new sunday ritual; soccer for daddy, park play for kids and mommy gets to relax ;)
here are some pictures of what we did.


she loved getting her hair cut and blow dried <3
this is Mommy's relaxation on sundays while the kids play at the playground and daddy plays soccer on the field next to the playground :))
a very crappy phone pic of daddy gettin' down on the field ;)
swim playdate with the Besties is always a good time :)) This next week will be soooo much fun, we are going to San Diego to visit family, can't wait for all the fun in store!

1st week of summer vacation!

Now that my big girl is out of school, we have EIGHT glorious weeks of vacation. No soccer, no dance, no school, NOTHING but good ol' summertime fun! :) I am bummed it's only 8 weeks, I'm used to getting 3 months of vacation from when I was in school but she will be back at the end of august. Since it feels like it will be such short time and it will fly by, I'm DETERMINED to make it as fun as possible and do as much as possible with my two kiddos. This first week was actually FULL of fun stuff: trip to the city for a picnic lunch by the Golden Gate Bridge, playdate with old (and new) tvam friends, movies, Father's day, Library.... sheesh! I'm tired just writing about it all.
Here are a BUNCH of pics of all the fun :)
My loves enjoying a lunch with the best view, the Golden Gate Bridge Playing with our friend's dog, we were dog-sitting for a week :) playing soccer, as always! ;)
My loves <3

This 3 year old has the funniest fake smile!
Love this drive :)
Father's Day brunch at Daddy's favorite, Country Waffles in Danville Library fun, playing with puzzles
Library fun playing on the computer, my big girl :)
working hard on their computers LOL
my chef baked some delicious healthy chocolate chip cookies! we went to go see Brave, and she LOVED IT! The princess in this movie reminds us all of our own Princess, not your average girl, a bit of a tough side to her ;)
closed eyes because the flash was too bright in the theater lol

Bad mommy moment for me, I completely forgot swimsuits for our water playdate :-/ LOL



Celebrating my AWESOME girlfriend's birthday at one of our fav. spots, Underdog (toxic-free zone LOL)

she loved my gift, we laughed so hard when she opened it! LOL

BFFs <3

All this fun and we are barely on our first week of summer! can't wait for the next 7 weeks of fun!!! :)

my little boy's 3rd birthday party!

I CANNOT believe my little baby is no longer a baby and is 3 years old now!!! This is the first birthday where the kids are old enough to really say what "theme" they'd like for their party, and my little man chose "Cars" He loves those movies and wanted Lightning McQueen and Mater everywhere! I was not feeling super crafty and I totally gave in to the idea of having this be a complete "party city" party LOL. I found water bottle labels and from there it was just downhill and ended up doing a bunch of personalized things, so much for a party city shindig! I made signs for the food table and named it "Flo's Cafe" and it had "cozy cones" with popcorn, I had the crafts table for the kids and named it "Ramone's House of Body Art" as the kids got to decorate their own small wooden race cars and could put tattoos on themselves. I had another sign for the table where the goodie bags were and where the presents were and it was "Mater's Tow" table. I made from scratch healthy chocolate cupcakes recipe here and I made a cream cheese frosting, recipe here The frosting was not healthy at all but it was sooooo yummy!!! Overall my little boy had a great party and all the little guests did too :)

Ladybug's Open House at school!

So back in late May, my big girl had officially been in school for almost an entire school year, and we were at open house!!!! I was so excited to see everything she had been working so hard on this whole school year! I know i'm using a LOT of exclamation points but I really do feel them to be necessary to explain how excited I was :) We got to see all of her work and everything displayed in her classroom and she was very proud to show us all her work and what she had learned. It was funny to see how much she truly had done because EVERY single day I asked her "so, how was school? what did you do today?" and I ALWAYS got the same response, "it was good, we did journal and recess" Not very informative! At last I got to see all the things she had done and I could not be more proud of my little student :))

Easter

This Easter was super fun for my kids; and I'm SO GLAD it's over with LOL. They have sooo much candy it's ridiculous! Putting their baskets together was stressing me out as the day got closer, because I just kept buying random trinkets or things I thought they'd like, and I realized that there was no theme to the baskets, and definitely almost NOTHING easter related ugh! So at the last minute, I did buy some bunny and spring things and in the end they loved their baskets.

We are also so BLESSED to have amazing friends, and one friend in particular had an Easter party for the kids and it was amazing!! Sooo much candy, sooo much love and thought into all the homemade decorations and games, it was super fun.

The best part of Easter for me was something my Ladybug did on Easter sunday at church. That morning, as she opened her eggs and saw the goodies she got, she realized she had money! (a few dollars nothing big) Hubby realized we had no cash (as always) for the offering and wanted me to ask Alyssa to let us borrow a few dollars. Well, as always, my questioning daughter wanted to know WHY we give money to church, what does it do and about a million other questions. After explaining to her why we offer monetary goods to God and what the Bible says about offering, she told us, "mommy, I've decided I should give ALL my moneys (yes, moneys) to God because it helps the church and God will bless me with money later on for giving him my moneys now." I told her she didn't have to give it all, even $1 would please God but she said "no mommy, I want to give it all" so she did!!!!!!!!

We will give her more money than she had to begin with soon, but I want to wait so she's not expecting it, as that's how it's supposed to work. Give to God, not expecting it back in return, simply having faith that he will provide all you need.

I will post pictures later, as always, I'm super duper lazy with uploading pictures. LOL

I've turned into an Organic Food Researching Maniac!!

I was chatting with a fellow SAHM friend at a play-date a few weeks ago, and the topic of conversation has started a whirlwind of changes in my home; more specifically in our food. We somehow got into the topic of organic food and she told me how she buys all organic food, and I told her that my husband would never go for all organic because it's just so expensive. She recommended I watch the documentary "Food Inc." to help convince my hubby of the benefits of buying and eating organic (I had told her he was a documentary lover.) I have always known that there are benefits to having an organic diet, but I did not know the exact specifics and I never really bothered to research specifics. I was not an organic shopper, and that was mostly because every time I walked passed an organic item at the grocery store, my jaw dropped to the floor when I would see the prices! I just wrote off organic food as something rich people and celebrities ate and it being "just another fad diet/food trend."

So that same night, I found the documentary on Netflix, and we watched it together. OMG- he was just as appalled as I was to see just how horrid our food in America is and how important it is to have an organic diet! We discussed and chose to start our "organic journey" with buying the "dirty dozen" organically grown only from then on. Since then, I have realized that when you buy in bulk, and buy sale items, organic shopping is not nearly as expensive as one imagines.

Long story short, I am now a maniac researching organic, local, grass-fed food and I thought I'd share this with you guys. LOL! I have read 2 books so far, educating myself on organic food and trying to figure out what I need to know to buy and eat to have the healthiest food for my family. It has been very interesting and I can see that this is now a part of our lifestyle that will stay with us forever. I hope everyone can take some time and really find out what is being sold to us in our grocery stores, and exactly how "healthy", and really how DANGEROUS our foods are in this country; it's a sad but very true fact that we are the most UNHEALTHY country in the world. The origins of our food is without a doubt a big factor of this fact in my opinion.