Disney Birthday

And how sweet are these princess dresses!! They were SO CUTE! MacKenzie was dancing around talking about how she was a princess and Kennedy was just happy to be at Disneyland. We stayed 3 days and 2 nights and she was still bummed to leave.



Snow White was amazing! Sleeping Beauty was great too, but something about Snow White made the "meet the princess" TOTALLY worth it. She took 5 minutes talking to our girls and listening to MacKenzie ask for lipstick and, "where's your dad?" Which translated is, "where's the prince?"



And we saw tons of characters. On her birthday Kennedy started the day at the park @ 9:30am and ended at 9pm.





Mickey! We just love Mickey. Finally saw Fantasmic too and it was worth seeing! Loved every minute.


For the year of 2009 if you have a season pass AND you go on your birthday they give you a gift card to use that day only. So she got $60 to buy whatever she wanted... which honestly gets you a small handful of things, but that small handful was A LOT more than anything I'd buy. Next trip will be on Justin's birthday. He's takin me to the Blue Bayou (the Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant). That food always smells so good, but we're too cheap to pay for it, but on his birthday... free!

Slave Driver

If you don't crack the whip young, you'll have a hard time crakin it later. The girls actually enjoyed this kind of manual labor... in the back of the truck and throwin things, what's not to love there? And they had help from their cousin Madelyn.



However we don't want to mess up our du in the process.



My in-laws picked up a load of wood while visiting a few weeks ago. For $20 a truck load Bruce thought it was definitely worth checking into. He came back a few hours later with the wood and of course the girls wanted to "help". Up in the truck they went which got them out of the way and useful at the same time.

Get Your Fingers Out

I pulled out the camera to get a shot of Grayson digging through the trash. He loves to open the lid and find a few hidden treasures, but not so much today.



Poor little smashed fingers in there. Doesn't he have the cutest little sad face you ever saw?!

Welcomed Visitor

Auntie Heidi came to visit! Holy cow she brought her 2 dogs and between her and the "puppies" the kids were in heaven! She needs to move next door. While here for the weekend she made monster cookies and amazing fudge. We also went to Tai Pan (every girls needs to go there), Ontario Mills Outlets, Olive Garden and to the park here in town. Good times!



Here's MacKenzie cleaning the fudge bowl. Each time I have "a piece" 12 make it into my mouth. Let me tell you it's GOOD! Thanks Heidi for the 25 extra pounds... I really needed that. To see more of Heidi and Jordan click here.

3 am

This morning we had a visitor from the Sheriff's dept... @ 3 AM!!! The deputy was knocking and ringing the doorbell trying to wake us up. Before I understood what was going on Justin was at the door talking to the deputy saying, "no our house is not on fire."



What?! Let me set it up first. I put the bird outside a few weeks ago, but because it gets cold at night we turn a heat lamp on for him. The bulb is red so when it's on obviously there's a red glow. Secondly we have a wood burning stove and we use that as our heat source. Naturally when you have a fire in the stove the smoke comes out of the chimney, that's kind of the point.

Early this morning a concerned citizen drove down the street and could see a red glow in our back yard accompanied by smoke. They called 911 and thus the Sheriff's dept at our door. What a morning. Thanks to whoever called because you never know, we could've had a fire in the house and not known... although I've done my fair share of smokin out the house trying to build a fire and it is pretty hard to breath. I think we might know if there actually was a fire in here.

Would You Be Quiet?!

I'm trying to read. Poor kids. I'm waiting for them to go to sleep tonight so I can read my old-new book uninterrupted. I originally listened to it on tape 5 years ago and loved it then... love it even more reading it myself.

The Kitchen

Well it's done! I finally finished painting the cabinets... how many months later, but I'm pretty darn proud of myself for completing project number 2. Now it's on to the kids bath. Let me know what you think and tell me what I should put on top of the cabinets.

Hi Mom!

Justin was recuperating the other day (sleeping) while I was running my errands. Upon my arrival I was graciously ushered in by Kennedy with a welcoming smile, "Come in mom!"




"We're making you lunch", she said. " It's so yummy!" If you can't tell that's apples, bananas, carrots, sour cream, ketcup, mustard, milk, applesauce... it had a balloon at one point also.



Then "we" suddenly turned into "MacKenzie did it all" when I asked about the mess. Very clever, but... gross! I don't understand how they can scale the fridge for a piece of candy, but have to use a laundry basket for the lunch bowl.

Wow...

"Those are the longest toes I have ever seen!" I usually hear this from others who notice my bare feet. However when I was getting checked by my new knee doctor he added, "I have seen LOTS of feet in my life... you have the longest toes by a mile". Thanks doc.



The secret's out now. In the same note this was a BEA-U-TI-FUL trip to the doctor. Besides getting made fun of, my knee yanked on and about 25 more x-rays, I received the most thorough treatment of my life! The end conclusion was that I need an MRI and possibly a CT scan for further understanding. I might have patella subluxation AKA: dislocated knee cap. I also have symptoms of a torn meniscus. The doc's comment was, "well I can't fit you into a box of 'torn ACL'. I can see there's an injury here, but it is definitely not your normal injury". So if I understand that correctly I'm out of the box with long toes... maybe I could use my toes to climb back in and get something fixed, ha!

The Birthday

Last year my birthday STUNK!!! January 4th is preceeded by:
1. Halloween
2. Thanksgiving
3. Christmas
4. New Year's
Who wants to have ANOTHER party after taking down Christmas decorations and sleeping in from New Year's Eve? I simply decided to change the date of my birthday to July 4th. I mean what's not to be happy about with swimming, BBQ's and fireworks? Then when it was about to be July 4th I didn't factor in MacKenzie, MIL and G-MIL all have b-days the week before. Bad planning again. So what do you do... threaten your sweet husband to make your birthday absolutely amazing or else! Ok maybe there really wasn't so many threats as there were LARGE announcements that my birthday was "going" to be the most fantastic birthday ever!

It totally worked! I had an AMAZING birthday even on fast Sunday? How much was optimism bunched up for the whole year and how much was it just being a great day? I don't know but it was awesome. (Here's my plug of thank you's to Liz, Mariann, Ellen and Milette who all gave me things I loved!) Justin then carried it on through the next few days by taking me to Red Robin's for dinner and getting me a season pass for Disneyland!

So we went to get our passes yesterday (we get the So-Cal-cheap-skate, comes-with-no-parking-pass ones) only to find out you can add parking for a small fee. And, "bring your parking voucher back and we'll refund it for you" along with that! The lady in the ticket booth was fantastic. She even gave me a birthday button when she realized I was celebrating my birthday. This alone got me a bag of fresh tortillas in California Adventures.




We didn't tell the kids where we were going besides that we were going to "look for Tinker Bell" the entire way there. So there's Kennedy looking out the car window up at the sky saying, "but I don't see the second star to the right". The girls were so excited when we pulled up to Disneyland.




MacKenzie made sure to show everyone she met her special Tinker Bell panties, ha! Within minutes everyone knew her name and what her underwear looked like:)

Katelyn and Scott (ask me about how I'm already planning their wedding even though they're "just dating") went with us and Kami & Jared met us at the park. The 11 of us stayed until 7pm and had such fun. I'm ready to ditch the kids at home and go on a date with my husband, if only I could convince some worthy babysitters to skip out on high school for a day...hmmm.

Anyway Happy Birthday to me! What a great day and now I'll have to come up with something even greater for my husband. His celebration is in 4 weeks and I need some fun ideas. He has to work on his birthday so should I take a "gun" birthday cake to the office? What cha think?