Simplicity

If you are striving for simplicity and organization in your life, this piece is for you. It's off one of my favorite blogs. It's not very long, enjoy!

Simple pleasure.

Rain, Rain

Enter unseasonable wetness. Inches and inches of rain. Tornado warnings. High winds. Snapped trees. Street flooding. Canceled flights. Grandma and Grandpa get to stay two extra days. Yay!

The babushkas ready to head down to peek at the high surf and beach erosion. We went to the fabric store and they both picked out some fabric they liked, hence the head scarves.

This is the beach we frequent and the high surf and erosion morphed it into something that only slightly resembled the beach we knew. This was before another rain deluge set upon us.

Playing hopscotch with the laundry. Such imagination.

Orange County has a "Great Park" being built. The only completed portion is the events staging area and the free hot air balloon ride.

They take you up 500 feet and you can see most everywhere in Orange County. Pretty neat.

This bike bike-rack. Free fun.

The three-seater.

The nine-month old expert stair climber. He's safe to go up there, as long as the toilet lid is down in the bathroom.

Brothers are yummy.

Intense coloring session. They've made a lot of use out of this little table. I love it!

Before the Rain

We are finally entering the rainy season here, and boy, is it rainy. I've never lived in a place where so much water falls in a short amount of time. Before that though, we enjoyed some fun with Grandma and Grandpa Cows who were taking a hiatus from the frozen deserts of Washington. Here are some pictures we caught one afternoon:

After lots of Evelyn pictures like the one above, Daddy caught the one below:

This boy is always happy at the beach.

Evelyn loves playing in the waves. Jilly, not so much.

We went to look at the tide pools, but sadly couldn't find any starfish. These "nenamies" were pretty cool though.

The south end of Corona del Mar.

The sun sinking into Catalina.

Christmas Day

We didn't do much for Christmas Eve, except for the watching of the "Joy to the World" dvd, and talking about the Christmas story. We did open one present, and explained to the girls why we give presents at Christmas. I'm sad we didn't get our gingerbread men finished in time to put out for Santa, but next year we'll just have to start earlier in the day.

Gordon got biter biscuits in his stocking. He was happy with that.

Santa organized a treasure hunt for the girls to find the pieces to this table and chairs set from Grandma and Grandpa Chickens. That was fun. I want to do that again next year.

Jilly wearing all her girlie stuff. They got princess stickers, lip gloss, sunglasses, headbands, etc. and Jilly was modeling it all.

We didn't actually open presents until after we did Christmas dinner, because we were waiting for Uncle Dan and Tante Elke (tante is German for aunt). I liked doing it that way. It didn't feel so anti-climactic to me, and filled the day in with fun stuff to look forward to. I think Ben had the hardest time waiting. This is Evelyn in her hooded towel from Grandma Cow pretending to be at the beach. Or something. I'm not entirely sure.

Playing with a new game from Aunt Chelle and Uncle Nate.

The baby escapee. Escaping clean from diaper changes, that is. You can see his two little front teeth.

Today we drove up to Torrance so Ben could be temporarily reunited with two best friends from high school. They joked and reminisced while us women took care of all the scrambling kids. We were home by 6:30. So not a party evening for us, but that's just about how we like it. I think we'll pop in a movie now. Happy New Year!

Newport Beach Boat parade

This has been the season of technological difficulty for us. First, our camera is going on the fritz, so we've only got 1/2 of the pictures we actually took, and then our internet decided to be a scrooge, so we were without it for about 8 or 9 days, with Christmas stuck in the middle of that. We had plenty of fun doing our first "at-home" Christmas, but we'll just have to remember some of it the old-fashioned way.

"Tante Elke" was so nice to us, and bought us all tickets to the Newport Beach Boat Parade. Kind of like the one I grew up with in Washington, except not so cold. So I was really excited.

We rode on a charter fishing boat around Newport Harbor as part of the parade for a while, then pulled out to watch the sailboats and boats of all sizes parade in their Christmas finery. The houses that line the harbor are decked out too, so we rode the entire harbor perimeter looking at those. Unfortunately, we didn't get pictures of the boats due to our camera's strike.

This is Jilly at the end of the 2 hour ride. Cold.
Happy Gordon. He did so well considering he was up 4 hours past his bedtime!

The crew as we set off. We joke now this ride took forever, even though it was fun. We didn't get out of dock until 8:15, and then when we'd circled the harbor and done some of the parade route, we all thought we'd go back to dock and get off the boat. Well, I guess there were too many boats trying to dock, so we rode past to look at some more houses. Then we passed the dock again 30 minutes later. Finally, after one more round down the north harbor, we docked. We were happy to be off the boat with our tired, cold, and becoming-crabbier-by-the-minute children.

This was fun, but we all agreed to get an earlier ticket next year or just watch from the shore. It's a fun holiday tradition, if you can beat the traffic and find parking!

It's a Wonderful Life

The battery in the camera died before we could get some pictures of Shaunie with the girls, we'll have to do that another day.

Thanksgiving, toilets, etc.

Here are pictures in no particular order:

Jilly being very proud of the fact she can wear her brother's Sunday outfit. Fairy wings, striped head pants, and pink shoes not included.

Evelyn and Jill talked all afternoon about sitting with Santa at the ward Christmas party, and then Evelyn nearly chickened out, and Jilly wouldn't go within 3 feet of him. Ben, Gordon and I played Joseph, Mary and Jesus in the nativity. We only had to look holy for the first verse of "Silent Night," which was good because Gordon was so tired and squirmy by that point. We did have excellent costumes though, courtesy of Ben's mom.

This little boy is getting into everything. I came out of the shower a few days ago to the noise of splashing, and thought I would see Jilly at the sink. He was having all sorts of fun in our toilet, and now the tub and toilet have become the premier destinations of our second floor. (And I know this is totally not safe and we now have to keep the toilet room door closed. And the bath tub drained...the list goes on.) He also climbs all the way up the stairs by himself and is pulling up on anything over 10" tall. We really didn't have to baby-proof with Jilly, she didn't care to get into everything. It's like having Evelyn all over again, but worse. He also eats and eats and eats...

Evelyn modeling her "I'm a 'dorable' princess" look. You can see our little tree up in the background.

After a yummy Thanksgiving dinner at Uncle Dan's house, we went to the nearby park and he snapped a picture of all of us swinging.

Evelyn thinks she is a dog. She also thinks she is a great reader. She started sounding out words in books a few weeks ago, and is progressing really well. It's surprised me how quick and early she caught onto it.

Another interesting development with Gordon's increasing mobility is his "playing" with Jillian. He crawls up to whatever elaborate scheme she's got set up on the floor and proceeds with destroying it. I'm having to teach her he doesn't know how to share, he just wants to play, give him something to play with, etc. But this afternoon she just got fed up with his attacks and conked him on the head with her shoe. This is the kid who just a few months ago, if she inadvertently hurt him, would melt into a puddle of tears. I guess all bets are off when your pretend tea party is in danger.