Tulip Festival

We had a wonderful, but very tiring day today. It's been a long while, but we decided to take advantage of the Tulip Festival in Mount Vernon, WA. It's about a 3-ish hour drive from where we are and the BIGGEST patience tester a driver has to go through (which is why Steve drives). While the drive is a straight, I-5 north, once there, you have to wait to exit (a good hour), then you proceed to wait to get to a field. Once we got there, we were in the car for another 2 - 2.5 hours just chugging along with everyone else. Granted the tulip festival isn't an activity that rates "fun" in Steve's or the kids books, but it is beautiful and the you can beat the pictures you can get. I've never had a bad picture. The kids did enjoy getting their pictures taken and we enjoyed walking around. AND it was a beautiful day in Washington for such and activity. Typically it's pretty rainy during the times the festival is being held and so you are sloshing in mud (which is why we typically don't go). This little trip has me tied over for a couple of years before I feel the need to for another visit.

Afterwards, while we were in the area, we headed to my favorite outlet mall for a little shopping. Got Jake a pair of shoes and the boys a little bit of clothes. I wasn't in it for personal gain today, so it was a pretty short trip... we still had a couple hours drive home. Once we were back in the area we stopped off at one of our favorite restaurant for some dinner. It was very yummy!

Now we are home and it's 10pm (we got home around 9:30pm), and I'm ready to call it a night. I'm sure there are a few hours of good sleep ahead of me tonight!

Easter 2009

We had a wonderful Easter and you would have known about it sooner had I been able to get my pix downloaded to the computer. Different story, different Blog!

Saturday we got together with our friends, The Lee family, for appetizers, dinner, and drinks. During our time, myself and Wendy stuffed many plastic eggs full of candy for the kiddos the hunt the next day. Then realized that we needed more stuff and did a Wal-Mart run. Okay, the night before Easter, not the best time to be in Wal-Mart. We were in line at Wal- Mart for as long as we shopped there. Crazy-ness! We came back to my place to wrap things up and then they headed out. I still had Easter baskets to make and to create the Easter morning scene in the Bell household. Steve and I went to bed, finally, at 3am.

Sunday - we rush out of bed at 9:45am to get the kids bathed and ready for brunch that we needed to leave for in 45 minutes. The words "on time" and "quick" do not exist in my household. Rather "rushed" and "on time-ish" are words that best describe us. So, around 10:30 we are not ready. Oh, and remember the "Easter scene" I mentioned above, yeah, still had to happen. So, since Jake was a year old, I have had an Easter bag (not basket) that I leave by his door, empty. Then from his door to his Easter basket I leave a trail of eggs for him to pick up and put in his bag. Well, now having two, I do this for both kids. They love it, so it's worth it. So, we rushed the easter bag trail thing to get out of the door by, yes, 11am. We have brunch on the waterfront in Tacoma, it was a disgusting rainy day, but the scenery made up for it. Then we headed back to my house and waited to see if we would get a break in the now thunderous rain. Yeah, 2 hrs into the waiting game, we have restless kids and still thunderous rain. We revert to plan B... Easter egg hunt indoors. These are things you need to be prepared for in Washington. The kids still loved it and they still got their hunt on.

All in all, it was another successful Easter!

Andy's 1st Dentist Appt - OMG!

Andy had his very first dentist visit today. I purposely put it off until he was a little after three because, well, Andy is our strong willed child and we need to have buy in before we can really proceed with anything new. We talked about it and we walked through some of the motions, but nothing apparently could prepare him for the real life event. We took him to a Pediatric dentist for the fact they are use to dealing with some children who do not always cooperate and I really didn't know what to expect with Andy. So, like any good mother, I expect the unexpected.

He did not want to get weighed or have have his height taken... so right off the bat we did not start off well. We get through that then onto X-Rays. Yep, was not having it. Wasn't going to participate and definitely would not be bribed into it. Okay, we'll just start the cleaning. Lord have mercy, you would have thought this child was being tortured if not for the sound proof crying room we were in. Aside from the fact the chair could have been made out of snapping alligators because he refused to sit in, he totally lost all composure as soon as they started to "work the chair", yes everyone, they laid it back and raised it up. The horror!! Imagine how the rest this experience went once they actually had to start cleaning his teeth. This is the first time that an appointment was a 2 parent task. Steve had arms and head and I got the feet. We had to restrain him in order to accomplish cleaning his teeth. The only positive is that through all the screaming they were able to clean his teeth successfully.

It was truly an awful experience. Unfortunately, he had the same reaction when first started to get his hair cut. If that tells us anything, it would be that it's going to take a few more rounds at the dentist in order for Andy to fell comfortable. Andy does not new experiences nor does he like any surprises.

Keep track of what's online the easy way!

Hopefully in this post I'll give everybody a good tool to keep up with whatever you find interesting online, like maybe this blog and the Frantz blog. What makes it easy is something called Real Simple Syndication, or RSS for short (if you already know what RSS is you can probably just skip this post). RSS is a way for a web site to alert readers of updates to the site. Using an RSS reader you have one place to see everything that's new.

In order to use RSS you need to start with an RSS reader. The easiest to get started with might be the google rss reader here. Another option, if you use the firefox web browser. It has a feature called live bookmarks that allows it to act as an RSS reader.

Once you find an RSS reader the next step is to subscribe to RSS feeds. The best way I know to find RSS feeds is to use firefox. If you're using firefox as your web browser (which I highly recommend) you'll see this icon on any page that has an RSS feed at the top in the address bar. Clicking on that icon will take you to the feed and give you some options of where to add it (with firefox live bookmarks and google reader being two of those options).

RSS feeds allow you to go one place and see updates for all the things you're interested in. I follow about fifty feeds in my RSS reader between news, comics, blogs, etc...

Hopefully you'll find this useful. Let me know if you have any questions.

You're lucky day - Very Long BLOG!!

Well, let me start off by saying Happy Reading. I meant to blog all weekend, but hurt my wrist like nobody's business and couldn't do much of anything. As technical as Steve is... he doesn't think to get on our little blog website and write a word or two for himself. To date, he only reads what I write. It's like an elaborate calendar entry for him to reference.

Saturday - Jake had his graduation for his Orange belt. The test was last Thursday and he passed with flying colors. Then on Saturday they make all those who pass put on a demonstration for the parents wrapping up everything they learned for the last 3 months. We are very proud. He's got his sight set for that black belt. It'll be a while, but it's a great positive influence and when it comes down to it, he loves it. You can see the yearning in Steve's eyes to get out there too. One day, Steve, one day. Right now, you can live vicariously through your son.
Sunday - Well nobody really wants to know that I spent the morning at the spa (again, while Steve's not writing this he would like me to add his input and say that he got me the spa deal for Xmas) which is great and all until I had an acid peel done to my face. Um, interesting. My face is still sensitive. That's really all I have to say.


Monday - Well, I'm pretty sure we crossed into March. By the looks of it it might as well be December all over again. I guess Mother Nature wasn't done with the pretty white stuff. While we are not expecting anything above 2 in, it's facinating that I still am writing about these, well, at least once a month. It is pretty and I don't get tired of looking at it... while I'm inside the confines of my house. While I was enjoying the beauty of it all, Andy's got really sick with some sort of stomach bug. Got up early this morning and hasn't been able to keep anything down. Thank goodness for hardwood floors!

Circus on Sodor - Thomas the Train

We have officially taken Andy to his first play production and as we guessed, he LOVED it! He was literally on the edge of his seat partially due to his size and partially due to the fact he was taking in the entire play. We had pretty good seats with no view obstructions, which is nice when you have little ones. After the play was over, he wanted to watch it again... the difference between live plays and DVDs.
After we were done with watching the play and eating junk food, we played by the fountain at the Seattle Center. It was a cold day, but it didn't stop kids from actually playing in the water. Andy had to settle for running around the fountain with Steve while I took pictures.THEN after we were done with the fountain, we headed to IKEA where Andy got a whole hour in the ball pit with kids his age and Steve and I walked around. I was conceptualizing refurnishing our loft while Steve humored me by saying, "Yep, ah-huh, that sounds great..." I still walked away with my latest organizational storage unit thingy. :)

Alas the end of the work week!

OMG! It's been one of those weeks. I worked like 60 hours, my house in shambles, I don't remember the last time I had a decent dinner, and I believe my kids grew at least a half inch since I saw them LAST weekend! Seriously! I'm so exhausted. There is nothing more that I would love to do than to sleep in tomorrow and do absolutely nothing. But my weekend is booked. We are taking Andy to see a Thomas the Train production tomorrow (which I'm so excited for him to see because I know he will LOVE it!), then there the "house in shambles" I'll need to clean, and to top it off I will need to work this weekend so I'm not slammed come Monday. Every little thing that I didn't get to during the 12-14 hrs I spent at work each day all week will need to be done by Sunday.

I hope everyone else had a much better week!