Bundle of Joy

Well, as the title insinuates we are indeed expecting a new one in our family next summer! A cousin for Camille and Estelle, that is. My sis broke the news to us all this past Friday and I have to say I think she kind of blew everyone away a little. I think my folks both thought she was sitting them down to tell them she was getting married and instead she's like, "umm, me and Jeremy are having a child". Her boyfriend's name is Jeremy, too.
Although my dad may need a little more time to recover from the almost-heartattack, we are all excited to have another babe in the family! Can't wait to meet the little him/her sometime in June. I know it's just gonna fly by and I am tripping a little because I only see my sister once every couple of months or so. With the holidays coming up I will see her a bit more frequently through dec/jan. but after that I know the next time I see her she will actually look pregnant, and then after that she might actually have a baby! Not too much time between now and then, and she's my little sister!

I had the funniest conversation with Camille and Estelle on the way home from Redlands in the car, it went something like this:

Me: "Soo, we are going to have a new baby in the family soon! Auntie Megan has a baby in her tummy!"

Camille: "Mama, is auntie Megan married?" (dammit - what were the chances of this one coming up? And right off the bat!)

Me: "Noooo. You don't actually have to be married to have a baby."

Estelle, after a contemplative pause and with sudden awareness in her eyes: "I am gonna have a baby! And I'm not going to get married."

Me, giggling quietly: " Ummm, usually it's nice to get married before you have a baby..."

Haha! soooo funnny! Estelle has stubbornly declared since she could TALK that she didn't want to get married. I think it's hilarious, Camille always pretends to be a princess and a bride and CAN'T WAIT to get married. As soon as it occured to Estelle that she could have the best of both of her worlds (NOT get married and still have a baby) she couldn't wait to declare it. Oh well, we'll see how this pans out in real life =)

Bugs!

I don't know what got into me, but I decided to make the girls' Halloween costumes this year! No matter that the only thing I've ever sewn with a machine was the hem on my curtains, I was convinced that I could do this AND that my kids would have the cutest costumes ever. Let me tell you, it is definitely NOT cheaper to make your own costumes. We already had much of the stuff at home for Estelle's costume, such as the leotard and tights. We made the wings out of foam board and fabric and then stitched them with fabric glue and stuffed them with bamboo filling. How cool is that? They now have eco-friendly bamboo fluff at Joanne's to stuff pillows and stuff with. It was a bit more expensive, but totally worth it from my perspective. Besides, how many ladybugs are going to have bamboo-stuffed eco-wings?

Camille's costume was super non-complicated to the pro sewer, but it took me forever! Don't laugh, but it took me THEIR ENTIRE NAP TIME to try to remember and figure out how to thread my sewing machine. I finally succumbed to the internet and downloaded the manual that I couldn't find around my house and once I got the damn thing threaded it went pretty well. The bobbin ran out of thread halfway through so I had to stop and refill that, but other than that it was pretty smoothly. Basically, I just sewed a tube dress that was strapless and put some elastic in the top to hold it up. The shimmery wing material lent itself well to fabric glue, so we utilized that for the rest. The sleeves are just tubes and the material bunches up and flows down the back. The dress has buttons down the back so she can get in and out. Overall I think they came out pretty cute!

Soo, yeah, I still haven't gotten any better at keeping up with this thing =) Gonna try to update before my kiddos wake up from their nap. Got me a new bike yesterday, you can check out the post over here about that. Our house still isn't done, we got going pretty good and then J had to start school again so things seem to have slowed WAY down. Our weekends seem to be freeing up here in the near future, though, so hopefully we will get it done sooner than later.

I recently quit my job- yeah, the really great one that I was braggin about not too many posts back. J is working more this semester (and consequently getting paid more) so it was either work and pay for preschool or stop work and spend more quality time with my kids. Hmmm - seemed like a no brainer! It's the first opportunity I've ever had to actually not *really* work. I am really excited to sit down with them every day and do kid stuff and art stuff and just bond with them a little bit more before I send them off to kindergarten. So, yeah, wish me luck on that!

That said, I have decided to take on a babysitting job =) Nothing hard core, just one day per week I am watching a little girl who lives around the corner. It's tough because we are still getting used to each other, but I know it'll be awesome for the girls in the long run to have some closeness with one of our neighbors. She is one and even though she seems like quite a baby now I know that soon she is going to be chasing after the girls with full force! They are great with her and I just hope that it all works out.

Oooh- it's time to start thinking about the fall garden and here is a pic. from one of our recent "yields." That's always fun! We've had okra coming out of our ears and I found this great recipe here. This is a picture of what it looked like after it was done cooking. It is super tasty and we've had it a few times in the last couple of months. If any of you have any good vegetartian okra recipes, throw them my way!

Camille and Estelle are doing really well, although we seem to be hitting a bit of a rough patch with Camille. I think she is bored/slightly jealous of Estelle. We've just been having a rough time with tantrums and stuff and I think we need to work on more one on one time together. It keeps crossing my mind to split them up here and there on a saturday (have J take one and I'll take the other for a while) so maybe that would be a good thing. She has always been such a trooper and she's never really complained about always splitting the attention, but I think it would be good for her. We'll see how it goes. I know probably partially having school would help, but I just feel that it's also a little something deeper than that and we need to work on our relationship together instead of just sending her off to school for the stimulation. We need to work on the stimulation here and also work on more structure.

Speaking of structure, just signed up for a tumbling class and are planning on another swim class soon. Cool thing about the Kroc center is that it has swimming year round...

The other pictures are from the Children's Museum (which we recently got to get passes for.) Fun times!

I'll post more soonish.

More stuff from today...

Yeah, Our neighbors might hate us a little. What do you think?

And a video of Camille, the master hoola-hooper! This is the first time I've ever made a video with my camera, so half of it is sideways. Oops - forgot about the fact that you can't flip the video when you are in the middle of viewing it =+) Oh well, you get the idea!

Color

So much stuff! We've been prepping and painting our house for almost two weeks now and I am TIRED. We are finally getting down to the last stuff and it's pretty exciting. today we completely finished with all of the white paint (the base color of the house) and I couldn't wait to throw on our first splash of color so the garage door got it, too! At this point, our neighbors may be freaking out a little. I almost started hyperventilating when I saw the color, but I am super excited about it. It's pretty! Along with this, we will have some splashes of yellow. Our house is going to look like a sunset. I love it! It will definitely be the brightest house on the street, but now it will be easy to explain to anyone coming to visit which house is ours :) Here is a picture of some prep work.

We went to the Orange County fair last week and that was super fun. Usually we make it to the Del Mar fair, but this year we missed it so we decided to meet up with my sister, her boyfriend and his nieces up in OC. She lives in Long Beach so it was a good place to meet and we had a really great time. The fair itself was beautiful, they had a great garden section and I think it inspired us to plant a cherimoya tree in the front yard where we were going to have the strawberry tree. The kids loved the animals and even though that section wasn't quite as big it was cool because it was a bit more interactive than the one in Del Mar. Also, all of the booths were outside instead of in a building which was really nice because the weather was beautiful. Yum, the girls LOVED the cotton candy (thanks, mom!) Sigh - I guess you've gotta give in every once in a while.

It was ComiCon this weekend which means that San Diego was crazy and we've had my family here since Wednesday. My folks stayed with us wed-thursday night and my cousins stayed with us on Saturday night. I love them all and it's been so fun for the girls to be with everyone and to do some fun stuff together. We got to hang out and swim at Ernie's hotel room on Friday night with them and they have been loving every minute of all of the madness. It's good to keep them occupied since we are painting the house as well, they don't get so bored with all of the other stuff going on. Here are some other random pictures from the last couple of weeks, Estelle modeling here mama's stuff and the girls helping to prime the garage...

as of late

We went to SeaWorld on Monday - what a treat! Thanks to Nana & Papa Blough we now have passes for a whole year! The kids totally love it, it's awesome to live in a city where there is so much fun stuff to do with them all of the time. Here are a couple of pics.

And, of course, the classic SeaWorld fireworks to top it all off. I thought that they stopped doing that? Oh well, it sure is pretty!

New hair

what do you think?

Per-go-lahhh

So, we put up a pergola this past week. We are now OFFICIALLY working on making our front yard look nice. My folks came down this past Monday and we started working on it on Tuesday and finished it up on Wednesday. Okay, admittedly my DAD and husband did the majority of the work, it didn't take too much muscle power on my part. It looks really nice, though! I am starting to get pretty excited about it...

And our house still is pretty ghetto. I will post pictures over the next couple of months of "the transformation" and we'll see how pretty we can make it look! Next week we will work on the sprinklers, then the fence. After that we will begin painting the house... we all know how enthusiastic I can get about colors! I think Jeremy has finally learned that it's okay to be a little afraid at first, but that it always seems to turn out kind of pretty in the end. He is finally learning to trust my eclectic sense of color enhancement. Awesome. It should be fun! Oh, and after all that comes the planting, but that probably shouldn't start until the weather cools down. Maybe October.

pedalmamas

Just wanted to point out that our good friend set up a collaborative blog for us mamas biking around San Diego. The link is on the left, so check it out to hear about our biking ventures around town!

Catalina vacation

June 8th - 16th of this year. We had so much fun! These aren't really in order of our trip, but I'll tell a bit about each one. The first three are from Two Harbors. The top one is our campsite at the campground in Two Harbors - BEAUTIFUL. I think this was my favorite spot. It was truly a pain in the ass to hike up and down from the town to the site, but just the fact that the town (and therefore hot showers, food, kayak rentals, etc.) is hikeable gives it a big boost for me. The spot truly is beautiful and you have a really nice beach right at the bottom of the sites. That's where the following two pictures are taken. The beach isn't really sandy, more like teeny tiny rocks - maybe the step right before they turn to sand. Not to rocky to be uncomfortable. Also, you can take the boat right into Two Harbors so it saves the hassle of having to take the bus to the other sites.
The next 4 pictures are from our first campsite in Little Harbor. Don't get me wrong - super beautiful, too! Not really hiking friendly for the kids, I wouldn't recommend going here unless you really want to do NOTHING but lay on the beach all day. There are two coves right next to each other and you can easily go between them both and pick where you want to hang out. Virtually no one else there, with the exception of the few other campers. This would be the perfect spot to take a group of playgroup kids for a few days. The beach is really sheltered, no big waves and just nice sand for the kids to play. The one of me standing with the girls is at our camp spot and literally right to my right about 50 yards is the beach. There is also a nice little stream that flows and you can hear the frogs when dusk hits - that's why the girls are wearing headlamps! We took them to look for frogs when it got dark. Super fun, didn't find any frogs, though. Lots of bats! Not easy to get to - I wouldn't recommend going here with the kids if you were just going to stay one night. Minimum 2 nights just to make it worth lugging all of the junk. You have to take the bus once you get off the boat.
The last picture is from Avalon. Avalon can get old pretty fast, it's just a very typical tourist town. The great thing there, though, is that there are tons of fun and touristy things to do. This picture is from the semi-submergible boat ride that we went on. Very cool! They feed the fish as well. I know, not very eco-friendly but the kids got a kick out of seeing all the fish swarming the boat! Catalina is pretty good about all of the eco-stuff in general. The whole island is a conservancy with the exception of Avalon, which is the only incorporated town. No one else is allowed to own property anywhere, so the entire island is pretty barren which is what makes it so beautiful. Buffalo herds are still prevalent (we got to see some) and a deer walked right up to our campsite. Fish are everywhere. All in all, a nice little place to visit. Ooh, we also had a blast kayaking here with the girls and we took them on a flying fish boat ride. Look at how well we are all sleeping in our first bed in 6 nights!

The kids totally didn't even fuss about sleeping on sleeping mats for that long, either. They were happy as clams to be dirty and un-showered and curled up in the tent. It was great and we all really had a lot of fun. If we were to do it again, I would do three nights in Little Harbor, 3 nights in Two Harbors and 2 nights in Avalon. This time we did 3 in avalon and 2 in two harbors.

It's been a long, long time

And I miss you! So much stuff has happened since last Halloween. It's almost Estelle's birthday (again) and I can't believe my baby is going to be 3. Life just flies by entirely too fast. Rylie is no longer with us here in San Diego, her family decided it was time to move closer to their own family and so they up and left to Boston sometime last September. We miss them so much! She was such a sister to Camille and Estelle, it's something that makes my heart hurt a little every time I think about her.
More recent news - Sarah (Jeremy's cousin) is about to get married this weekend! She's kind of been MIA since they started dating and after they get married they will be relocating to Utah. We will miss them and it will be sad that the girls won't really get to grow up with their cousin Trinity.
My aunt Debbie is in the hospital, something about an infected diverticulii (ughh) so we are just praying for a safe a speedy recovery for her.
We just got back from an AWESOME vacation in Catalina where we spent 8 nights there and 2 nights in Redlands on either end of the trip, so we were gone from out home for 10 nights! Camping in Catalina is awesome, I think next time we should mainly camp the whole time and steer clear of Avalon. I will post pictures and a more detailed blog on that once I upload them. Just trying to catch up!
I have a new job - well, one I started in March. Actually, back up. I worked at Barnes and Noble from sometime in November until the end of February and then I "went seasonal" to take this job. It's with the Faith and Work Ministry at my church and I love it! It allows me to work from home and be flexible and it's wonderful because I feel that through my work I am now contributing to serving God in a way that I haven't before. I feel that life is so busy that I don't get the time to put all of my energy into my church and my community, but this way I can at least surround myself and make my work my faith.
On the topic of church, we have been going to Harbor for a little while now and it's such a wonderful group of people with amazing hearts for helping each other and our community. It's just been truly a blessing to see it grow and to fall into such a wonderful community of people. We have been doing our bible study regularly, though it's manifested into something totally different than it was 5 years ago. The Wilcoxes (mike and joan) will come to visit us next week which will be very cool. I know Camille and Estelle will love to see them.
So, this is rambling and I was going to delete some of it, but then I thought the reason that I am doing this is for something to look back on and something for my girls to look back on. This seems like just random goings-on in my life, but really all of it pertains very much to them. They know these people, they know my jobs, my current life is also what they live every day. It will be a good log for them to be able to look back on one day! Next post will be more kid-centric, I promise.