While You Were Sleeping...

The title of one of my favorite movies, but really what happened today at our house. Justin had a "We aren't 16 and can't go to Winter formal party" at Joseph Kupferer's last night. They had a great time and stayed up all night- no sleep at all! So after going to yoga with me and throwing the football with Dad, he came home and slept for 5+ hours! He did something to his injured knee at basketball as well last night and it is swollen again...

Anyway, while he was sleeping, I made brownies (after my oven got fixed) and spent the day sorting through papers and junk, Marin had Paige come over and they went with Amber to Yogurtland. Ryan went to a funeral for his co-worker's mother, and then Ben, Grace, Paige and Marin made homemade lemonade. They went outside and picked tons of lemons off the tree and juiced them all.

After the lemonade was ready we headed to Castle park and they set up their stand.

We were only there less than an hour, but they sold all their product and made about $11. Not bad. There is writing on the lemon Grace is holding up that says "Gracie's Lemonade Stand".

When we got home Justin had finally woken up!

January 13th!

What did you do on January 13th? While much of the country was enjoying snow, Grace and I headed to the BEACH!!! In January! I was trying to think of something fun for us to do that didn't cost anything and I was stumped. Finally I thought about what a beautiful day it was and I had heard it was supposed to be about 75 degrees at the beach, so we headed off! We went to the small cove near Corona Del Mar beach where we could park for free on the road and walk down to the tide pool area.

We happened to get there right at high tide which wasn't my plan, so we spent a while making an awesome sand castle. We played in the creek bed that heads into the ocean. The water was cold, but not too too bad.

We had a great time, Gracie and I playing in the water, having lunch, finding shells and exploring the rocks. We found some crabs, sea snails and other ocean life after the tide started to lower. Grace loved walking on the rocks and looking around, but really did not want to have anything to do with the actual animals. What a beautiful day! The fact that is was in January just made it all the more fun.

These are our "mermaid" pictures. Grace took the one of me all by herself!

Happy January!

Play Dates

It is a strange phenomenon that we now always have to schedule "play dates". Something I never did as a kid. We would all just run out in the street when we finished our homework and start playing. Oh well.. the good old days. Now I spend most afternoons getting asked "Can ____ come over?" (fill in the blank with any friend's name). Here are some of this week's play dates-

Gracie and Sophie (What a messy room!). Marin and Amanda and Ben was at Max's.

Back to School and More...

Inspired by Joy, I am making a goal to write and show a picture or two each week of 2012. (She is doing a pic a day, but I don't know if I could keep up with that so I will go for weekly). This week was back to school... HOMEWORK!

We actually had a really slow week for our family. So few things are happening extra this week that we had dinner as a whole family every night! On Thursday, I had "Gracie Day". We played together the entire day! We made super yummy homemade bread using Uncle Wade's recipe. 3 of the 4 loaves were gone by the time dinner was over :).

We also played with Play Doh, did workbook pages, and watched "Arthur" (the PBS cartoon, not the movie about the drunk guy living in NYC). She played with my hair, we painted toenails and even made a cement block for the backyard with Grace's footprint and decorative stones.

There was even some time for watching television! What a nice week.