Disneyland '09

Here are about 1/4 of our pictures from Disneyland. Enjoy!

Halloween day #1...

Because Halloween comes on a Saturday this year, we have to dress up the kids two days in a row. Here's day #1 - the girls school Halloween parade......

Danielle is an 80's Rocker Chic.

Ashley is a Geisha.

The girls right before they left the house for school...

This is Kaman at his school Halloween program...

Every year on Halloween we take the kids to my sister's work for some trick-or-treating and to check out their fun decorations. The theme for my sister's office was Where's Waldo. Here's some pictures....

Day #2 pictures coming soon...

The quilt is finally finished!

Lots of stitching, re stitching, sewing and re sewing, ironing, tying,1 migraine, and six long 8 hour days later and my quilt is finally finished. But I couldn’t have done it with out the help of my very talented mother (who later told me she was more excited to see the finished product then I probably was).

She helped me buy and pick out the material,


She helped me figure out my sewing machine I received for Christmas and had never used.


Next came cutting the material to just the right size

And then figuring out the pattern, sewing, ironing, and tying...

and finally binding it just perfectly.

24 hours later it was put to good use…

No More Pesky Fruit Flies

Ever since we moved in our new house 5 years ago, we’ve had a problem with fruit flies. And every year for 5 years I’ve gotten rid of them by trying to wack them with a fly swatter. Not very effective since they are so small, and the only thing they land on are my vegetables/fruit and I don’t particularly want to smash those too. So this year I decided to try out my own devices and vacuum them up. It was a better solution then using a fly swatter, so why not. I kept the vacuum out all day and went about vacuuming them up. Well, when Duane came home that night he let me know the way to get rid of fruit flies. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me this secret 5 years ago, but I thought it was very clever and tried it out.

You put a rotten tomato in a jar filled with water to just below the tomato, and leave it out on the bar.


Then when the flies land on the tomato, you cover the top with your hand and shake it up until they drown.


So there you have it… the clever way to get rid of your pesky fruit flies.

"I" before "E" except after "C"

Danielle’s teacher moved her and one other student up a level in spelling this past week. He gave them a dictionary and told them to choose 20 words, and these are some of the words they chose: Ambidextrous, Ambiguous, Callisthenic, and Amethyst. Those are some very impressive words for a 5th grader. Some of her words I didn’t know what they meant and I had to take a second to make sure I was pronouncing them correctly. I was testing Danielle on these words the other night and Duane starts laughing because he’s trying to spell the words along with Danielle and can’t do it. I would say she's up for a Spelling Bee contest. Wouldn't you?

We are very proud of our little girl. She impresses us every day with her accomplishments. Way to go Danielle!

First Day of School!

Tuesday was Kaman's first day of preschool and today was the girls first day. They've grown up so fast. I was just looking back at the pictures I took of the kids on their first day of school.



This is Ashley going into 1st grade...(left)







And here's Danielle in 1st grade...(right)

This is Ashley on her first day of preschool..(left)

And Kaman on his first day of preschool...(right)

I love to see the comparison of the kids at their same ages.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of Ashley on her first day of Kindergarten and Danielle on her first day of 2nd grade. But here is Ashley today on her first day of 2nd grade and Danielle on her first day of 5th grade...

Our First Yard Sale

Note to self: Garage sales are not easy.

We found the most irritating part of garage sales is it takes at least one full week to get everything ready. First you have to go through everything in your storage (for us, it was a lot), get your signs ready & posted, yard cleaned, any items that are caked with dust - cleaned, and then comes pricing EVERYTHING. It was not only exhausting but very stressful. I was up until 2:00 in the morning for three nights straight. The morning of the yard sale, I had a whole list of things to do before we started at 9:00am. Duane opened the garage around 8:15am so he could get the stuff out of the trailer, and while he was backing up we had a couple people come pull up and get out of their cars, then we had another car pull up, then another, and another, and another...it was only 8:15am! They were early and we weren’t ready! I had to forget the list of things I needed to do: forget showering, no breakfast, and the kids had to fend for themselves.

We also needed to have been warned that early garage sale buyers can be very aggressive. As soon as Duane opened the trailer doors we couldn’t get the junk out of the trailer fast enough before they started snatching them. Honestly, I don’t know how much stuff we had stolen. We had a couple Hispanic ladies fighting over women’s clothing. Duane had one Hispanic man come up to him and tell him he had locked his keys in the car and needed a ride and my sister very casually walked over and said, “we can call the cops, they’ll give you a ride for free.” He walked off and found another ride. Another Hispanic man told Duane he only had $5 to spend on an item that was marked for $10, so Duane sold it to him. Then as soon as Duane turned his back, he bought an item from me for $5. We also had ladies try and convince Duane that I had told them the price was lower then was marked; thank goodness Duane was smart enough to ask me before he accepted it.

It was a crazy day, but we made some money and still had fun. I think next time we will open earlier and have someone watch to make sure nothing is stolen.


Here's Danielle getting our signs ready to post.



This is what our garage looked like the night before.


This is the yard sale at the end of it. I was WAY to busy to get a picture when we were mobbed by the buyers.

This is it all cleaned up. Phew!