Turks & Caicos

What better way to enjoy the holidays than to say, "I got as much done as my could before Thanksgiving, now it's time to relax and say, 'screw it' to all the other preparations and spend time with family."

We joined my husband's family in Turks & Caicos (in the Carribean if you are as geographicly challenged as I am).  There were 23 people in our group! The 5 of us, his parents, his grandmother, his sister, her husband and her two girls; his other sister, her husband and her three girls; his step-sister, her husband and her 3 girls and one son (yeah, we're a little girl heavy on my husband's side of the family-makes up for the extremely boy heavy family tree on my side).

So last time we all met up there, Carter was 3, Henri was barely a year old and not quite walking and I was pregnant with Valerie (though we hadn't told anyone!)  This time was a little different.  We got the same set up we had last time... a 2 bedroom suite that has a kids' room with a door, sink, bunkbed with a trundle and an Xbox :)  The huge bathroom with jacuzzi tub (we never used this time) shower, double sinks is in between and then Paul and my room with a huge king side bed as well as a chair that can fold out and a daybed with a trundle.  Yes, theoretically this room sleeps 8 people!  Considering our children seem to have a heck of a time sleeping somewhere besides their own beds it worked out fine.  Henri always slept in the bottom bunk just like home.  Carter alternated between the top bunk and the daybed in our bedroom. Valerie alternated between the two trundle beds. 

How did the kids do? In a nutshell, Henri did outstanding.  He was happy, did whatever we wanted and puretty much passed out wherever he was when he was tired. Carter did as well as Carter does when he's tired and somewhere he can't control what food he's eating.  He had a great time and was for the most part his usual happy, helpful self, however there was some whining due to the great diversity in bedtimes while on our trip.  Valerie. Well, Valerie pretty much screamed and threw a fit whenever she was not either in the pool or in the shower AKA the water.  Bedtime was not great considering shes not great going to bed at home and in T&C without a door she cant open and sharing a room, she was a pain.  The first night, after having flown overnight and having a 6 hour layover in Miami (sidenote: we had 6 hour layover both ways and the kids did GREAT! We were very much thinking about changing our flights to prevent it but there weren't many options coming from the west coast, but it worked out fine).  Midnight she was throwing her swim gear and shoes at us screaming "SIMMING!!!!!!" 

I don't have the details handy of what we did every day and where we ate (important at a resort!) so I'll have to do anothe post when I have that, but for now I can share the pictures.  And yes, it turned out to be very relaxing even with 3 kids in tow. To start with, our room came with a spa credit which we used for a couples' massage.  Also, having our kids be the ones that no one ever gets to see, all of Paul's family were very nice about asking if the kids (esp the boys) would like to swim, play games, go for ice cream, etc. The little kids swam with Puddle Jumper floaties, so I could lounge by the side of the pool with a magazine and check periodically on them and felt like they weren't going to drown.  Frankly, any place where having a Pina Colada at the pool at 10am doesn't make you the mom they all whisper about is a relaxing place to be.

Hmmm... maybe we didn't have to buy tickets for the kids... looks like maybe they'd qualify as carryon!

Play area at SeaTac

We finally arrived and the kids got to enjoy the white sand:

Paul and his neice went parasailing

Which was good, because I really don't like height. Especially heights that involve me way up in the sky in a tiny harness.

Seriously, painful to get her out of the water. I looked every night for gills.

Valerie finally gets to meet Elmo. He's terrifyingly large for a monster who is supposed to only be 3 years old.

Henri's pretty happy with him, though.

 Henri's ready to try out the snorkel gear in the pool. Unfortunately there was a tropical storm that passed by the week before our trip, so although Paul and I did go out snorkeling once, we did not have the kids go as the water was pretty choppy most of the week.

view from the snorkel boat of the resort

Carter in his nest, the daybed next to ours.... after they put it back the next morning he left a note each day saying, "please don't brake"

We did the Sesame Street Character breakfast, which I think was worth the cost, especially since kids were discounted and Valerie was free, they got a small Elmo plush and a cup with a straw.

Elmo's not so scary from across the room. Her second favorite character was Ernie

Watching the Characters dance Gangnam style was awesome too... I may have a video somewhere from the Elmo Birthday party we attended. The kids also baked with cookie monster while they were in childcare while we were at our massage.

Trying to get pictures of Valerie before family photos. She runs way too fast!

after the first 3 days of not having to wear shoes she was just too cool and refused to wear them. This continued until about 3 days after we got home...

First thing in the morning our fun was to check out the cabanas and see how the towels had been folded....

A rare moment out of the water, she finally started napping about 1/2 way through our trip. Well, passing out randomly by the pool...

 Carter remembered the swim up bar that served milkshakes from last time (he was about Henri's age last time we were there) and was excited to introduce the concept to Henri..

Valerie got a braid and bead combo like her big cousin and examined it carefully before finally leaving it alone, though she thought it was fun on the way home to click the beads on her headphones...

The boys loved having so much time with their cousins B & C and would ask where they were anytime we were separate...

How do you spend 6 hours in an airport and then 6 on a plane with 3 small children? Electronics, baby. And have backups because if you have a delay you will run out of battery life.

 

 

So that's our trip, we made it, we relaxed.  Then we got back and realized it was only a few weeks until Christmas! (coming up next)

November

Ah, November. Fall is always a busy time in our house. I get signed up for things, the kids start school, new routines, etc.  By the time the last week of December rolls around I kind of feel like I'm recovering from being hit by a truck. This year is no exception.

However, I also try to keep things in perspective and have fun.  Besides downloading Gangnam style for the dance game for Kinect, I laughed over and over at the following two videos online this month.

Gay Men will Marry your Girlfriends

And

First World Problems


Living under a rock and still don't know Gangnam style?  This link can show you all the rage...

Here's Paul doing it which is super funny, too....

(by the way if you are reading this blog at work, make sure you have your volume turned low as both links have sound. One has a bad word, but I'm not telling you which one)

As soon as the church charge conference was done we had another well, issue shall I say... come up at church.  Tent City 4 asked us in November if we would be able to host them in January. We've hosted Tent City twice before. Before the first hosting, the neighborhood wanted nothing to do with it.  When we hosted the 2nd time it was kind of a non-issue. Neighbors were more curious about it than anything else.  So we said yes, we would take them starting January 12th when their current 90 day permit was up to stay at their current location.  TC4 had some issues with their parent organization Share/Wheel which came to a head and about 3/4 of the residence from TC4 defected to make their own encampment now called Camp Unity Eastside. Long story short is that we had to recind the offer because we took in Camp Unity Eastside. When I say took in I mean that in the 10-14 days it took us to get the camp up and running (no tents, etc. were taken from TC4, so all new supplies had to be procured including 200 pallets, 600 blankets and 60 sleeping bags and about 40-50 tents and tarps) they were literally iving in the sanctuary, hallways, etc (not in classrooms, we have a co-op preschool which occupies our classrooms during the week).  Since  being Membership Secretary means I'm on the board, it took up a lot the room in my head thinking about procuring supplies, etc.

The other thing that happened is I started working with a group called The Heart of Giving.  I got brought into it because a friend of mine runs one of three Garage of Blessings out of her home about 20 minutes away. I met her through my Mothers of Preschoolers group.  She and I have similar personalities in that we both feel that we should help out our fellow neighbor and are both pretty much type A personalities with a love of organization :) Basicly the Garage of Blessings is a free garage sale.  People donate to the garages instead of say, Goodwill and instead of the items being resold at a thrift store, they are given for free to anyone who needs them.  Heart of Giving is an umbrella organization with similar goals who partnered with the garages.  Heart of Giving runs various FaceBook pages that work like the garage but for immediate needs outside the garage as well as bigger items that are too large for the garages to keep on hand.  These pages are in various parts of the country.  Anyways, she was thinking it would be easier for her if she could run the garage and organize donations open it for people to "shop", etc. if I could help her by keeping an eye on the Facebook page for her particular area.  Since I use FB regularily I thought, sure, no problem.

What this means is I'm an administrator. If inappropriate comments are made, offers for money are put up, advertising or spam gets put on or a need is posted then met, I delete stuff.  Seems I've done my job too well as I'm now referred to as the "Silent Terminator" and a behind the scenes admin for about 20 pages now.  I focus on the 3 I was first put in charge of, but rove to other pages as they need help and I have time for.  It's been fun seeing the blessings, like a few kids who gave up their Wiis or DSs that they barely play with so they could be given to kids who were hoping to get some for Christmas but their parents didn't have much money after paying rent or losing a job but made just a little too much for many of the Christmas programs available in the area.  We seem to be filling up a gap between "entitlement programs" as the US seems to refer to them these days and the working poor. I also love how much stuff is being kept in use and out of the landfill (BTW, did you know we are the first state where we recycle more than we throw away???)

So with all this going on, I'm working on delegating more chores. Like the laundry. We're now folding about 4 loads at once  (about one weeks' worth of laundry) rather than every other day.  Because of the arrangement of doing more chores Carter told me one morning that I "ruin all his fun". That evening we all spent an hour folding the 4 loads of laundry on my bed. (By "we" I mean, me, carter helping as much as he could, Henri helping when he felt like it, Valerie dumping the 3rd roll of toilet paper this week into the toilet and throwing the laundry on the other side of the room, and Paul being at work) Carter says, "this is fun! We should call what we are doing fun chores!" the kid is wacked.

Oh, yeah, still trying to potty train Valerie. We're at about the same stage as my last post. I put her on the toilet, she pees, then if I leave she puts a roll of TP in the toilet (we've gone through a lot of TP lately). She poops her pants every time, never in the toilet but she's still getting enough in the toilet that I do less laundry than using cloth diapers, so I'm sticking with it. Since our schedule has been wierd with the older kids off school, we've had some bad days where she just peed her pants all day, but now that I'm getting her back on task it's back to where it was.  She even kept up while we were on vacation (vacation and Christmas will be in another post-this is just filling the gap of the end of November)

Besides all this I took a scrapbook class from Inspired to Scrap and won a grand prize for completing all my homework by the end of the month! Not to mention all the great pages I completed for the kids' albums (mostly pictures from Carter's summer vacation away from home). I enjoyed it so much I'm signed up for another one in January from Feeling Scrappy.

I haven't been doing much large-scale cooking, so we are eating up dinners from the freezer from swaps and my own pre-cooking.  Though one night we hadn't thawed out and needed to eat up some of our Costco purchases before leaving on vacation, so I put hot dogs in crescent rolls.  Carter's comment was  "mom, this looks like Jesus wrapped up in those cloths, doesn't it?" Guess I know what to make for lunch on Easter!

Around the same timeframe, Carter realized one of his good friends from school (a girl he likes to play Pokemon with) lived down the street.  I went on a field trip with Carter's class at the end of last year and met the girl's mom. Down to earth, from Canada, really liked her.  So I said, "Tell her we can have coffee and you guys can play!" So Carter writes a note, "Dear xxx's mom: My mom would like you to call and have time to have coffee with her. Our number is XXX=XXX=XXX and Olivia and I can play Pokemon."  He walked it down to her house and handed it to Olivia's dad who passed along the note.  Mom calls and says, "I just got the note and my heart melted, how cute!"  We had a playdate, though I realized afterwards that "mom" was "soon to be stepmom" so I was totally confused because I thought it was her mom that lived there, apparently her dad lives down the street (just moved in between last year and this one) with his fiance.  Anyways....

Paul and I had our 9th anniversary. Didn't really celebrate, but hopefully next year will be celebratory.

When we met 10 years ago...

When we got married 9 years ago...

We had a great Thanksgiving with my mom's family sharing lots of traditional Thanksgiving food :)

Next post... our vacation!

Oct/Nov Update

I hate going so long between posts because I tend to forget all the details! Though if you are on FaceBook you've probably seen many of my pictures, I try to save details for the blog, though since there's more room.

Let's see, we left off at the pumpkin patch.  We of course then have carving pumpkins and costumes. This year Valerie was a pink dragon, Henri was a pumpkin like last year (I want to put one of his pics from last year up to, I wonder how much he's changed in a year!) and Carter was a ninja which we revamped the ninja costume ET wore last year.

Valerie gave me some much needed quiet time....

We started putting her hair in 3 pigtails until we could cut it....

 

Post haircut:

 

 

 

Valerie's being potty trained. She's doing better than the boys, but the major progress like telling us when she should go rather than the other way around and the "big stuff" is a bit problematic when she barely speaks.  I'm thinking some of the non-verbal stuff is that she just wants us to do her bidding. As seen in her frequent self-satisfied smile.

She's still loving simming!!! (swimming)

The little kids have been helping me run errands while Carter's at school...

getting the car checked out, they gave the kids rock candy and silly bands....

 

Valerie and I hung out at the bakery while our windshield was replaced (Paul hit a very small, very sharp rock) and I worked on the church charge conference membership report.  BTW, the conference is over and the district superintendant said it was "the most detailed membership report" she'd ever seen :D and was impressed by the amount of work that obviously went into it.  I'm so glad that the job will be 100x easier next year!

 

 

Valerie's also taken to watching TV (mostly Super Why & Dora) in odd positions...

 

 

And fallen asleep in odd places

 

 

Finally at 7 1/2 Carter lost his first tooth!

 

 

And finally, some videos....

 

 

Pumpkin Patch 2012

Valerie, Henri and I met Henri's class at The Farm in Snohomish  we went through the simple hay maze with slide, the petting zoo, then took a tractor ride out to the pumpkin field, picked out pumpkins (pics will be later when we carve) and then had ice cream.  When his class left, we went and played in the corn kernal pit. The kids loved this as much as going out to the pumpkin field.  No cider doughnuts, though, we were sad to find out that they are only available on the weekend.