Angel game and fireworks

Had another great night at an Angels game tonight. Had a big ol' bag of peanuts, some red vines, some crackerjacks. Gina used the boys' hats as bowls to put crackerjacks in. Necessity is the mother of invenntion, eh. Sometimes a baseball game is an excuse to sit there and have snacks for three hours. Seth and I talked batting averages. The boys cheered at the outs and home runs. Really fun time. Then they had fireworks afterwords, that was awesome.

Mom Rocks with a day at Newport Beach

On July 9, I took all five boys to Newport Beach...by myself! I've been wanting to give it a try, but wasn't sure if I could manage all the ins and outs of a day at the beach without the help of my wonderful husband. Don't get me wrong, it's still easier with good 'ol dad along. I'm just proud of myself for doing it and having fun too! With the help of my Becco carrier for Levi, the Wonder Wheeler for the gear, and a few older boys to help, we managed to get on the sand. It was a perfect day. Seth enjoyed boogie boarding while Channing body surfed. They both joined the bigger kids out at wave break, which made me a little nervous at first. After watching them for a bit, I was able to relax. They were hanging in there just fine. The little ones and I built sand castles. I was finally able to figure out a way to make a whole village before the kidzillas knock it down. We have lots of buckets, so we filled them all up with sand, turned them over to form our village and THEN took off the buckets. Magic! For a second, before they all come running to smash the town to bits. Fun to be a kid!

I thought I was going to have to take all the kids home along with the pounds of sand that they accumulated during the day, but we even managed to do showers with changes of clothes before leaving. Hooray! It did take us an hour to pack and get cleaned up with just mom on duty, but I made sure I left plenty of time on the meter to do just that. All in all, I can't wait to go back and do it again.

Vacation - Friday

 
 
 
 Friday my awesome cousin Steve and his wonderful bride Kim popped down from Seattle to help us ring in the 4th for the weekend with our folks and Sis/Sonke/Sophester. We BBQ'd and once the sun started to dip down behind the horizon, we blew stuff up. It was great. Steve and I had popped over to Chino (home of federal penitentaries, air shows, and SoCal's last known seasonal fireworks stand) to pick of a bag of little beauties to light off.

Vacation - Wed, My Birthday

 
 
 Wednesday was my 37th birthday. I started the day off right -- bike ride with my kids. I took them as far up Telegraph Canyon in Chino Hills St Park as we could get before they started dropping from the heat. A friend twittered me to watch out for snakes, but we didn't see any - the snakes were too smart to do something retarded like try to go up Telegraph Canyon in July. Anyhoo it was still a great ride w/ the boys, and we made it back to the house just in time to throw a pile of New Yorks onto the bbq for lunch. This is a great pic of Sophie right after she and I conspired to like TOTALLY get fourths on the awesome cake. Costco, I don't know what kind of Faustian deal your baker struck to produce the best cakes in the world, but give him a squeeze for me.

Vacation - Tuesday

 Tuesday we packed up the mules and made it down to Crystal Cove, a wonderful beach once you're able to finally establish basecamp. The ladies -- my wife and sister -- LOVE this beach, no doubt because they're not the ones fording streams, catching buses and walking through drainage pipes to get all the stuff from the van to the sand. No, they get dropped of at the "Queens and Kids Drop Off Zone" where muscular slaves cart them off like little Newport Cleopatras to their shady beach zone. The husbands, on the other hand -- me and my brother in law -- we pop twelve Tylenols and get to work unloading the mules. All in a day's work. A beautiful beach with one claim to fame that no other beach on earth can claim -- the magic staircase to the Shake Shack on the bluff overlooking the beach. I've been hitting up that shake shack since I was little more than a wee grommet grabbing the 43A bus w/ a Morey Boogie Mach 7 tucked under my armpit. Of course back then it was the actual Shake Shake, now it is a Ruby's, but whatever. They still serve up the Monkey Flip, ask for it by name. The tide pools on the south end of the cove provided much fascination.

Vacation - Monday, Pt 2.

 
 
 
More Monday pics, because they are awesome.

Vacation - Monday

 
 
 
  Well I was hoping to post pics as the vacation materialized, but yeah right. How about two weeks after the fact. My sister and her beautiful family arrived over the weekend, and we cruised over to Bracket Airfield on Monday for a delightful little picnic. Fortunately I was able to arrange for a few helicopters to take off and land right in front of us over the course of the afternoon to entertain us. I was also able to book the "freaky bunny that doesn't run away" to scamper out of a tree for the kids to play with -- the bunny's handlers assured me in the contract there were no bizarre bunny diseases involved, so I can only assume they had the poor thing narcotized. All in all a wonderful day. Afterwards we bowled, because that's how we do it in the 909. I swear.

Angels Game

 
 Had a grrrrreat time at the Angels game last night with Seth, Channing and Chase. It was jersey night, so the boys got jerseys. The Angels rallied to win in the eighth. Yeah, rally monkey! And lest I forget ... I snagged a foul ball. Yes finally I was "that guy" -- the guy that gets the foul ball. It was pretty cool. Held it up for all to see, felt the cheers, and handed it off to Chan for safe keeping. The boys had a lot of interest in the game, had a ton of excitement, cheered their hearts out, and we had a terrific time. If you can tell, I was pretty pumped about the night. Poor Chase was just about falling asleep in his chair by the ninth. But Seth wanted to stay 'til the end, which filled my heart with pride, so we happily stayed. It was easy to stay for the other boys, such a great game. Noone complained. We smuggled in animal crackers and apple slices. Had a "preferred parking" pass, so got to be big important people and parked in the big important people lot.

Piano lessons and standardized tests

Been giving the top two (seth and chan) piano lessons. Their practice has been paying off! Some real progress. Started them on chords tonight. Gina has worked practicing into their daily routines so it's going pretty well.

Got their annual standardized test scores back this week, too, and were very pleasantly surprised. Great progress. In fact both Seth and Chan each scored a "Post High School" level in a subject - Seth in science (of course) and Chan in reading comprehension. Way to go, guys. Not bad for a 2nd and 3rd grader. So I renewed their teacher's contract for another year (that'd be their mom.) Being homeschoolers, we don't care terribly much about the standardized tests, but its nice to know they are tracking just fine. Better than fine in fact. Much better than fine. Keep up the great work.

Went camping

Had a GREAT time camping over the weekend with Seth chan chase drew levi and gina. We went to Glen Helen regional park (the "untamed wilds" as I call it ... not) with the boys' Contenders for the Faith school group, about five other families. It was great! Had fun campfires at nights, the kids put on skits, did some fathers-day themed "game shows" to see how well the kids knew their dads. Spent saturday at the park's water park, swimming and hitting the water slides.

Slept well enough, considering the freeway was close and the very active railroad was too.

Everyone had a great time. My better half forgot the camera (she blames me) so as of now we have no pics, though Christina hopefully will email a couple she took of us.

Boys ran around field collecting, er, "treasures" - mostly broken glass ("crystals") and even an old mostly intact muffler. Comedy. A billion bottle caps, Seth made pins out of them w/ a hammer and safety pins.

My tree-identification skills totally paid off. Ashes, sycamores, oaks of course, and even a beautiful, lone "desert museum" (yes thats the name of a tree) out there covered in yellow flowers.

On sun morning I, er, "led" little-kid worship and Rick gave a nice msg. Then a mere three hours to break camp and home we came.