July 4th Weekend

The long weekend is unfortunately over and it's back to early rising for work and summer school, the 5:30am alarm was definitely not welcomed on Monday morning.

We spent the weekend at home, Alan had some work to do on Thursday and over the weekend so we just hung out. On the 4th I went and bought a water slide for the kids, we set it up on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It was lots of fun and we'll be able to use it all summer and for some years to come.

Here are some pictures of all of us on the slide, Alan and I even went on as well as the dog.




Here is a little video of Sammie going through the small slide.........no doubt that she loves water.......oh yeah, that's me jumping through the slide first with Sammie following.........



The whole weekend we also worked on the remodel. We took down all the plastic, cleaned up from the drywall work and started working on painting. I think we used about 12 rollers so that means we switched paint 12 times since we just pitch the rollers after each color. Of course a couple of colors we had to do two coats so it was two rollers, like the ceilings needed two coats which was horrible. Poor Alan, he does all the rolling and I do all the cutting in. We work great together.

So here are the before and after painting pictures of the bedroom wall and laundry room.....




I hope everyone had a nice weekend.

Thanks for checking in and love to all, Kim

Cancun Vacation

Alan and I just got home from Cancun Mexico last night. Alan got an all expenses paid trip for four days to Cancun from work for exceeding his sales quota, thank you HP. The kids stayed with Grandma and Grandpa for the long weekend. Thank heaven for Alan's folks, Ruth even had to take Lauren to summer school two of the days by 7:30am now that's one wonderful grandma.

We arrived on Friday afternoon and went to the Casa Magna Marriott Resort. This is our room, yes there were two double beds. We thought of going back to the lobby to get a room with a king size bed until we looked out of the window. Wow, we were on the end of the building so we had a direct view of the ocean so we opted for the view over the king size bed.
This is the view looking to the right off our balcony. Isn't it just spectacular? We were on the 4th floor so we had a great view.
This is the hotel looking back from the beach side. Gorgeous.
The first night we had a cocktail reception outside and then a wonderful mexican buffet dinner in one of the banquet rooms. Then on Saturday, Alan went golfing while I backed out of the golf since his buddy, Ken, was golfing too and I just hung out at the pool in the morning. Then I met up with Ken's wife, Veronica, we went to lunch, chatted, got to know each other and then went shopping. We laughed sooooo much while we were together. It was great fun to hang out together. Saturday nights dinner was a choice between 4 restaurants, we of course picked one of the steak restaurants over a seafood one. It was a very nice and definitely tasty dinner for just the two of us.

Sunday was a mellow, no scheduled activity, day. We had breakfast in the restaurant and then met up with Ken and Veronica to head into the city to Mercado 28 (Market 28). It was like a swap meet shopping area. We had lots of fun shopping though I think the guys were done way before the girls were, they ended up at a table having a beer and cigar while we girls finished shopping. This is Alan and Ken at Mercado 28.
Sunday night was the awards dinner for the guys, jacket and tie for the guys and cocktail dresses for the ladies. Here we are with Ken and Veronica. We actually clean up ok when we try...........................................
On Monday our flight left at 4:15pm so we had breakfast with Ken and Veronica then we went down to sit on the beach for a while. That's Alan smoking a cigar in the beachside bar area while I was sitting on a chaise under an umbrella in the shade. The water was just beautiful, the most amazing blue colors. I only went in up to my knees, I'm not real fond of the beach - just can't get past all that sand stuck on me and the sticky skin you get from the salt water (I'm just a wimp). The water was so nice, not cold, just the perfect temperature.
These are some pictures of Ken & Veronica and Alan & me at the pool on Sunday afternoon.
We had a wonderful time. It was nice to get away just the two of us but it was also great to come home, see the kids and sleep in our own bed. The humidity reminded me of why I'm happy not to live in Florida any longer :-)

Love to all, Kim

Construction

LOOK, LOOK, LOOK ------------ we have drywall, yeahhhhhhhhhhhhh.....................

Here is the laundry room, backdoor on the right and office door on the left.
This is looking at the office door from inside the office, look there is a solid wall, you can't look through the shower anymore, pretty cool huh? That's the little closet Alan has left in the office, currently filled with hanging wires for our computer network, phones, modems, routers, etc.
This is looking into the bathroom, the vanity will be on the right, the toilet will be on the right closer to where I was standing in the doorway and the back (where the insulation and studs are showing) is the shower.
Tomorrow is the drywall nailing inspection, then the drywall tapers come on Thursday. Once they finish we can clean the office and move back into it (I think) since after that it's all painting and hanging the door and baseboard which is all us, no contractors for that stuff.

Once the taping is done, we'll get Bill over to start on the tile work.

Thanks for checking in with us.

Night all, Kim

Ryan's Class Party

Ryan had his end of the year class party for 2nd grade this week. I can't believe he will be starting 3rd grade at the end of August. Here he is with some of his friends playing a game, there was a carnival theme for his party..........................
This is his friend Everett.................................
This is Miss Hanika his 2nd grade teacher, she was amazing. I made her a cookbook from the class. I saw the idea in a Family Fun magazine and emailed all the parents. I was able to pull the whole thing together in 6 days. Each child wrote a note and drew a picture on an 8x8 piece of cardstock and each parent emailed me a recipe which I formated and printed on an 8x8 piece of carstock, everything was put into a scrapbook. Cerene, Miss Hanika, loved the cookbook. She said she was going to make every recipe in the book, there was everything from jambalaya to smoothies to chocolate soufles. I also made copies for each person in class, that's 21 kids. My printer seemed to print non stop for about 3 days with all the color copies, about 400 pages on cardstock no less.
I had to get a picture with Ryan and Miss Hanika, always thinking of the scrapbooks :-)
See you soon,
Kim

Lauren's Graduation

On Wednesday we had Lauren's 8th grade graduation. Seems kinda silly to me, we just got a pat on the back and sent on to high school, but she got an actual graduation. It was at her school and it was ridiculously hot, over 100, and we were all sitting outside in chairs with umbrellas for shade. We were there an hour early since Lauren had to be in her class early and with the gas prices we didn't want to take two cars, so there we sat.

Here she is walking back to her seat after getting called up on stage.
We went back to the house afterwards to BBQ dinner for everyone. Here she is with her grandma and grandpa, Ruth & Ernie..............
Here she is with her little brother, Ryan.................
This is the posed picture outside, I had to have one of just her to put in the scrapbooks.............
Here she is all dressed up in her "dancing" dress. There was a dance for the graduates in the school gym from 9pm - 11pm. A little late for my taste but it was only one night. She looks so grown up in this picture................
So next she has 6 wks of summer school to take one of the classes from next year, getting a head of the curve and she will also have 6 wks of summer sports camp for soccer at the high school as well. She is going to try out for the soccer team when she starts high school at the end of August.

Thanks for checking in.
Kim

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to everyone. We had a mellow morning at home, just hanging out before going to Alan's folks house for brunch with the family. Here's Alan with the kids after he got his amazing father's day gift, new undershirts and socks. Wow, aren't you sad that you didn't get such an amazing gift today?
At 11'ish we left to head over to Ruth & Ernie's (Alan's folks) for a Father's Day brunch. Everyone was there except Kippy, one of Alan's sisters since she had to work today. Here's a picture of the kids with grandpa. This is where Lauren gets her gorgeous blue eyes from, thanks grandpa. Grandpa says he's feeling pretty good for an old guy and he figures he'll make it another week. He is so funny, he says that to me everytime I ask him how things are going.
This is cousin Reid with his girlfriend Kitty along with Aunt Honey, she'll be 95 in August and Leslie (Alan's sister).
We all had a nice brunch and sat around chatting for a while before heading home. We watched the US Open Golf Tournament, Tiger and Rocco tied for first so tomorrow they will have a playoff match. Then the Lakers #5 playoff game was on, they won so there's one more game at least. Alan doesn't think they'll beat the Celtics in Boston especially for 2 games. We'll see how it ends, only time will tell.

Thanks for checking in.

Love to all, Kim

Happy Birthday & Ryan's School Statue Project

This is Ryan as Benjamin Franklin. He had a living statue project at school where he had to memorize a short speech about his topic. On Friday the kids all stood like statues on the blacktop at school, the parents were there to walk around looking at all the famous people. We were to walk around and tap them on the shoulder which would make the statue talk and recite their speech to us. Ryan did a great job and looked oh so cute.
We just finished celebrating Lauren and Christine's birthdays. We had the 14th & 41st birthday parties together tonight. It was the Carpenter's, Winget's, Sinnott's and Lauren's friend Crystal.

Here is Christine opening her scrapbook tote from Jen, Steve and the kids. She also got a scrapbook kit so now she's all set to put some of her 5000 pictures into albums.
Here is Lauren getting a Jonas Brothers belt from the Winget's. It's very cute and has 3 of her favorite guys all around it. That's Crystal sitting next to her.
Lauren picked jambalaya for dinner, which Alan made for her and I made a two layer cake with strawberries and whipped cream frosting (with my new Pampered Chef cake pans, they worked great).

Lauren didn't expect any more presents from us since she had already gotten her new cell phone, a Samsung Blackjack II, a dress, sandals and I took her to the Wango Tango concert in May where she saw the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus among other performers. Well I went a tad bit overboard and found out that her favorite band the Jonas Brothers added a couple of concert dates here in Anaheim for their new tour so I did that magic mom thing and got 3 tickets so I can take her with a friend in July. I had a shirt for her that has tinkerbell on it and the words "dreams do come true", so I paperclipped the tickets inside a special People magazine that is Jonas Brothers cover to cover, then I wrapped the shirt around the magazine and put that inside a box. Here is a video of her opening her gift......................she was pretty shocked but very excited..........................

Thanks for checking in with us. Have a wonderful day and see you at the next entry.

Kim