Happy Birthday Joshua or in other words...where did my baby go?!

My brother-in-law, Jon, recently sent me this blast from the past.

This is Joshua at about 6 or 7 months playing out in my sisters backyard. And here he is on his birthday. My baby is growing up.

I have been playing up Josh turning 3 for almost a year now. Mainly because I made the mistake last year of telling him that he could keep his bottle until his next birthday. Yes, we let our son have a bottle until he was three years old. I was mainly okay with this becuase we let Nathan keep his till after Josh was born, so to about the same age, and it was really great for relaxing him at night so bed times were super easy. Jessica put her foot down a while ago so Joshua had been going without a bottle easily over there. Richard tried a few times before his birthday, but usually just when he was frustrated with Josh about something, so as soon as Richard felt better, he let Josh have the bottle back. But I had been playing up Josh's birthday for months, always including that "when you turn three, you will be a big boy and you won't have a bottle anymore."

Well, he turned three, the bottles went into the recycling, he is a big boy and he doesn't use a bottle any more. He did ask a couple of times for his bottle but I think it was just to check if I was serious. I do feel a litlle bad because he loved his bottle so much and he looked cute drinking from it. I would guess though that he wouldn't appreciate it if he was still using it in middle school.

My baby is growing up.

Happy Birthday Richard!

Yesterday was Richard's 36th birthday and I think that he had a pretty good day. He didn't get much in the way of presents but that was because he bought his present a few weeks ago: a motorcycle and driving lessons. And if your worried about it, he also bought himself a helmet, riding jacket, boots, and gloves. It's all good stuff; the helmet covers the entire head, not just the top. Richard's tennis instructor gave him some pre-riding lessons lessons and they included some cautionary tales that included an examination of one of his helmets that he (the tennis instructor) was wearing during a minor crash. Actually, I don't mind that he wants to ride a motorcycle. It's something that he has wanted to do since as long as I can remember. But now he has a healthy view of his own mortality (birthdays after 35 do that to you) and I think that he looks at how the boys view his riding habits so it all helps keep him honest. I'll get a picture of it all one of these days.
The rest of his birthday celebration included cards from me and the boys, a few small presents and while Tifarrah (Richard's sister) watched the kids, we had dinner at Richard's favorite restaurant and did a little shopping. We ended it with birthday cake back at the house, shared with Tifarrah, R.J. and Cris (Tifarrah's boyfriend).
A word about the cake. I didn't have time to make it and didn't get over to Goldilocks's (Filipino bakery and restaurant) so we just stopped at the local grocery store. I was trying to get Joshua to pick out the cake but he kept focusing on the Dora the Explorer cupcakes. Luckily, Nathan picked out a nice strawberry shortcake cake. Yummy!

Memories

I love what kids remember. Last week when we were up in Sacramento visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, we took a trip over to San Francisco to check out a museum at Golden Gate park. While walking around the park outside the museum, we came across several pieces of statuary and one made an impression on Nathan. Tonight while I was putting him into bed he said "Remember that man we saw that was naked? He had a sword and we saw his penis. " At this point he pauses and giggles. "At least he had a cape."
You're right kid. At least he had a cape.

Beautiful vs. Cute

Yesterday Nathan got his school pictures back and I was very excited to see them. I guess I was feeling a little sentimental because when I saw them the first thing that came out of my mouth was "Oh, Baby, you're so beautiful!" To which Nathan replied "Not beautiful. Cute."

364 days till Halloween

The morning after Halloween, while I was doing some cleaning, Joshua pushed the stroller over to me. It was out because we had used it the night before when we went Trick-or-Treating. After getting the stroller in place, Josh picked up his Trick-or-Treat bag, climbed into the stroller, and said "let's go!" I had a hard time explaining to him that Halloween is only one night a year.

Welcome Max and Diego

About three weeks ago, we had some new additions to our family. I was at singing practice while Richard and the boys were out buying supplies for our pets. Some how they ended up at the animal shelter and a little while latter we ended up with two kittens. It was a good lesson in delayed gratification for my boys as they had to wait a couple of days for the cats to be "fixed" before we took them home. Here is Joshua and Nathan looking down the hallway for the vet tech bringing the cats to us.
And here are the boys holding the cats. They were so excited to bring home their new pets.

And here are our new babies, Max and Diego. And yes, we can't tell them apart with out their collars. They are 11 week old brothers and we felt that a pair of brothers would be good for our two boys. I am trying to teach the boys proper kitten etiquette, but at least the cats will still play with the boys.

Happy Halloween!

I hope that you all had a good Halloween. We definitely did.
We began with a magic show at the local library. It started out kind of small, but by the end it was packed. The magician was really good with kids, in making everything really silly and with keeping them all under control. He had several of the children come up and help with the different tricks and Nathan got to be one of them. Here he and another little girl are tying up the magician. After the show, the library provided drinks, cookies, and little goodie bags.

After the library we ran home and got costumes on to go to our wards Halloween party. It was a more subdued affair than I have seen before, maybe because it was competing with the "big night" itself, but it was still well attended, well executed, and well enjoyed. After the party we still had a little time before I felt like it was too late to Trick-or-Treat so I took the boys out for a quick stroll around the neighborhood while Richard stayed home to man the door. We were only out for about a half an hour but were still able to get quite a bit of candy. Apparently it had been a slow night and many of the houses gave us large handfuls of candy just to get rid of it. Of course, now we have a whole lot of candy.
If you couldn't tell, Joshua dressed as Woody from Toy Story and Nathan was Wolverine of X-Men.

We did the pumpkins yesterday and Nathan helped out quite a bit this year. He cut most of the hole in the top, scooped some of the insides out, and drew his own design on the pumpkin. Maybe next year I will let him carve more but we will see. I did just about all of the work on Joshua's although he did tell me what he wanted as a design. Nathan's is on the left and is a walrus. Joshua's is of Elmo and I am rather proud of how it turned out if I say so myself.`

Tooth Fairy Visit

One of my favorite memories from my childhood is of when I had lost one of my teeth on the same day as my older sister's birthday slumber party. I was probably about 6 so she was some where around 11 years old. Now, I some how got to be part of the party (don't ask me how, I'm sure that most pre-teens wouldn't want their little sisters at their birthday party but I was very grateful) and we had all set up our sleeping bags out side in the playhouse that used to be in the backyard. We were having fun talking and playing around when I decided to check to make sure that my tooth was still under my pillow when I found that the Tooth Fairy had some how already visited. I was so astounded because I was already becoming jaded and had suspected that my mom was really the Tooth Fairy. But my mom hadn't been outside with us and as far as I could remember, no one had been around my pillow. It was proof to me that the Tooth Fairy really existed! Looking back, I realise that Mom must have recruited someone in the party (was it you, Jessica?) to play Tooth Fairy and I just hadn't noticed when the switch was made.
I bring this up because Jessica's daughter, Jillian, is spending the night with us tonight so that she and Nathan could have a sleep over. Jill has been losing teeth right and left and she happened to loose one tonight (I kind of think that she and Nathan must have done something to help it along). So now it is my turn to play Tooth Fairy and I hope Jill is just as excited as I was.

The best laid plans...

So, my sister's in-laws are having an anniversary party this weekend and my brother-in-law of course wanted to be there for it. The only problem was that they wanted to leave today so that they would have plenty of time and the trip wouldn't be too tiring. The hitch was my kids and who was going to watch them when Jessica and family left? Jessica told me about this last week and we discussed options. We worked something out, and then Jon worked something out, messages got crossed and Jon ended up in the doghouse for a little while. It all got sorted out and everything was set for today. Then of course, life happened.
Josh came to our bed early this morning, having been woken up by throwing up. I was hoping that it was going to be a one time thing and that life would go on normally. It didn't. Josh was sick again. And again. And again. I stopped counting when I got up to ten. So I called in sick to work, cancelled the babysitter, and kept a bowl handy for Josh to puke in. He got pretty good at it.
I thought that it ended up being a wonderful example of Murphy's Law. There had been so much work that went into making sure that we had a babysitter for today and it ended up that we didn't need one anyway.
Josh was fine by this afternoon and I'm sure that it was all due to my wonderful friend, Rebecca, who brought us Sprite and soda crackers since we didn't have any of either in the house. Thank you again Rebecca.

I think that I have an target painted on me.

Yeah, my weekend started out with a bang, or maybe I should say a crunch. I was driving to pick up the boys from my sister's house and had just exited the freeway. I stopped at the end of the off-ramp and started inching forward to merge with traffic. The guy behind me had stopped and saw that I was trying to merge. Well, I decided that I didn't want to merge, but the other guy didn't notice that and kept going. Here was the result. Because he had started from a full stop, he wasn't going very fast and the damage was less than it could have been. The car is drivable but the trunk is fairly useless. The other driver has insurance and now we are just waiting for them to contact us so we can get the process going. That's the real bummer about getting into an accident on a Friday at 4:30 p.m., everyone is gone for the weekend.

Big Bear Weekend

I hear that in some parts of the country, people actually do labor on Labor Day weekend. Putting up storm windows, storing patio furniture, stuff like that. I would have been fine doing something like that but Richard, who usually has to work on Saturdays, had the entire weekend off so he planned an out of town trip to celebrate the end of summer and the starting of school. He did the internet research and rented us a small house in Big Bear for the holiday weekend, I planned and bought food for us to take (to try to avoid buying groceries there or eating out, both of which we did anyway), and we took off Saturday afternoon for a lovely weekend. Richard still worked for a few hours on Saturday so that he could catch up on a few things and be less stressed over the weekend. And I finished off a homework assignment and e-mailed it to my teacher so that I could be less stressed as well. We were in Big Bear by four and at the house by five (the rental office had written down the wrong house number so it took some detective work to find it). We cooked dinner, the boys went swimming in the jacuzzi (or kajuzzie as Nathan says it) and then did a little exploring before bedtime.

The rest of the weekend was much the same. Relxing, eating, swimming and what ever activity we could find to do that seemed special to Big Bear.

We went sliding at Alpine Slides,

we stopped by the visitor center,

we took a ride on the Miss Liberty

and we tried out a jet ski. All in all, a very good weekend and I think that we might be hooked. We will definetly go back again.

I hate freeways

I'm avoiding doing my homework right now. I'm also avoiding parental duties. Richard has a tennis class every Wednesday night so I am in charge of the bedtime routine. Instead of rounding up the kids into the bathroom, I'm ignoring...I mean I'm letting them watch "Over the Hedge" in my bedroom right now. I wish that I could just throw then into bed with out a bath but Richard would give me a look like I'm the worst parent in the world. Never mind that he will buy them any thing that they want. Sorry, I'll stop complaining now.

I did have a somewhat exciting weekend, although not how I would have liked. See the following pictures.

Yes, that is a pipe sticking out of my bumper. A four foot long, three inch diameter, metal pipe; the kind that they use in portable scafolding. I was driving to a friend's house to spend a couple hours with him and his family enjoying their pool. His son and Nathan are the same age and we are trying to get them to be friends. About two miles from their house, a semi truck runs over this pipe in the middle of the freeway and it gets sent spinning towards us. I swerve to avoid it but don't get out of the way entirely. At least I was able to take it off the freeway with me so no one else got hit. When the AAA guy came to help me fix my tire (which I somehow busted during this whole experience), he and his trainee just stared at the pipe rather dumfounded. AAA guy did help me put it into perspective when he said that we were really lucky. He then changed our tire much more quickly and safely than I could have (we were still on the shoulder of the freeway), took the pipe out, and sent us on our way (I'm really glad that I have AAA, never mind that Richard works there). There seems to be minimal damage to the car. The bumber is being replaced and the body was dented a little but the repair shop will just pound it back out. In a week and a $500 deductible latter, everything will be back to normal. Otherwise we are all just fine. Joshua, who was asleep at the time of the accident, didn't even wake up. When he did wake up, he and Nathan thought it was a great adventure. They were a little disapointed that it was a van that came out to change our tire and not a big tow truck. We then went on to our friends' house and had a good time swimming and eating lunch.

Summertime, and the living is easy

Do you think that Josh has a future as a Jazz musician? Probably not, but you never know. By the way, did you know that my kids are growing up? I didn't, it surprised the heck out of me. They both seem entirely too tall. Nathan will be starting kindergarten in about two weeks. And Josh seems to be entirely potty trained. Jessica, Richard and I have been working on it for the past year and a half (mostly Jessica, thank you again for that sis) but it still feels like it was all too easy and happened very quickly. Nathan is even showing signs that he may be reading soon. All of it is great, but a little scary too.
On another topic, today I made one of my favorite childhood dinners for dinner tonight (corned beef casserole and cabbage for those that wanted to know). When I finished putting the cubed cheese on top I looked at it and realised what a 50's dinner it was. Half of the ingredients are canned, including the meat, and to quote celebrity chef, Gorden Ramsey, it "looked like a pile of s***t." But it sure was yummy.

Random Cuteness

This is a little bit of a misnomer because although this post will be random, cuteness is subjective. I was talking with a co-woker who is on maternity leave right now and she was saying how she can totally understand all of us nuts, uh, parents, who just can't get enough of their kids and want everyone else to know. Also, not all of the stuff that that my kids have been up to lately is all that cute.
For starters, Nathan is getting to be quite a helper. Of course, at five years old he is still not always a help. On Saturday I was needing to catch up on the sleep that I had missed all week. Joshua was down for a nap and I had set Nathan up with a movie. I locked the front door and laid down in the living room so that if Nathan tried to go out the front or if something else happened, I'd be able to wake up. I was doozing when I noticed that Nathan hadn't settled down. He kept walking through the living room to the kitchen and rumaging arround there for something. It's not unusual for the boys to grab a utensil out of the drawer to play with and all of the dangerous stuff it out of the way so I wasn't worried enough to fully wake up. A little while later he goes back to the kitchen and comes back with a large stack of napkins. At this point I'm worrying a little, I mean why should he need napkins in my bedroom, but I just tell myself that it's just some paper and I didn't see him bring any food in there. A little while later he comes back through muttering about how much cleaning there is to do in the house. Silly me I just stayed on the couch. I actually did fall asleep after that until he decided that he wanted to hang our U.S. flag out side and opened up the front door to do so (see, my plan worked). I watched Nathan hang the flag and then realised that I had been laying down too long. If nothing else I needed to wake up Josh so that he wouldn't sleep to long. First thing that I noticed when getting up was that the floor was wet. Not to big of a deal with our wood floors, but definetly unusual. I then start walking back to my bedroom when I notice that there is baby powder on the floor, a lot of baby powder. To make this long story shorter, Nathan had spread about half a large bottle of baby powder all over the master bedroom and had then tried to clean it up with baby wipes, wet napkins, and a duster that he grabbed from the back closet. I appreciated the effort, but it just about took all the energy that I had got from my nap right out of me. I called Richard up a let him know that we were having dinner at a local fast food resurant becuase there was no way that I would be able to make dinner, clean up the mess, and keep the children alive long enough for him to get home from work. Only two of the three would be possible. Also, I figured that the kids needed to get out of the house and expend some energy on the play-place at Carl's Jr.
Joshua is getting more and more talkative. I still only understand about half of what he says but he it getting better at expressing himself and we are getting better at understanding him. He, like most children, has some words and phrases all his own. For example, when he wants to watch the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" video he asks to watch "chicka-bow-wow." This is refering to a line in the movie when Alvin says "bow-chicka-wow-wow" when meeting a cute girl. In fact it is one of Joshua's favorite lines to say whenever. Proabaly because Richard and I get such a kick out of it. It reminds me of when Richard taught our nephew Tim the words to "Brick House."

Getting into the swing of things

I have been back at school for about a week and a half now and I'm starting to feel like I know what I'm doing. I've been teaching for 1 1/2 years now. I started mid year with my first group of students. They had had a series of substitutes for the first semester and then they had me; I tried my best to not let them know that I had no idea what I was doing. I guess that I am still technically a 2nd year teacher but becuase I am now on my third set of students, I feel like I'm starting my third year. It is actually kind of dishartening becuase I am still looked at as being a very new teacher (which I know that I still am) but I have also seen many teachers come and go so I also feel a little bit like I have some longevity.
My new batch of students seem like a very good group. It they stay like this through the rest of the semester I will need to send a note to the middle school teachers letting them know how good of a job they are doing. I also have quite a few former students this year and it is awfully fun. A few are repeating Biology because they failed the first (or second) time. But there are a few that I had for Biology two years ago and are now in my Marine Biology class. It is a lot of fun to see all of these students again and even a bit of an ego booster that they are willing to take another one of my classes.
I even had on of my seniors tell me that she has decided to go to college to become a doctor, a brain surgen probably, all because of disecting a fetal pig in my class. She was particullay talented at taking the brain out.

The End is Coming...

...of my vacation that is. School starts back up again next week and I'm starting to get back into teaching mode. It's always weird to start the school year again because for me that happens near the beginning of summer. It's even weirder this time because I attended graduation ceremonies for some of my former students yesterday. They officially ended their high school careers yesterday, while next Tuesday I'll be getting a whole new batch starting their time in high school.
Here are a quick bunch of unscientific statistics (because I didn't take notes yesterday during the ceremonies) for you about Fremont High in south LA. We have about 5,000 students in four grades spread over three tracks (we are a year around school). Entering Freshmen class is usually something a little over one thousand strong. We had a little over 400 students graduate last night. The rest of the students are either progressing normally, or they are "pluses," as in "he is a nine plus" instead of being a 10th grader. Not a technical term really, but when you have enough kids failing too many classes to progress normally, you tend to make up terms to describe it quickly. So doing rough percentages, less than 50% of the students that enter our high school graduate. On the encouraging side, more than 75% of those graduates are planning on attending and have been accepted into a college or university. And of these students, they received an impressive amount of scholarships, grants and awards. I think that the principal said that the total was something like $300,000. I don't know what is typical, but I was impressed. Of course that only works out to be $1,000 per student but since I got diddly squat, I think that they did well.

Our Weekend with Austin

It is a lot of fun to meet a new friend. It's even funner to meet a new family member and become friends. About a few months ago, we got a phone call from Richard's older brother's ex-wife. She was pregnant when they split up but we didn't know much more than that. The baby is now a 14 year old teenager named Austin. He, his mother Tracy, and his younger sister Alyssa came to visit us this weekend where we got to help celebrate his birthday with him and he got to get to know his father's family. We had a nice, lazy day at the beach on Saturday, we celebrated his birthday on Sunday, and we had several nice meals with various groupings of the family. All designed to give us good "get-to-know-each-other-time." Austin and Randy got along great and have continued to communicate over the internet. All together it was a very good visit.

Happy 5th Birthday Nathan!

My baby is getting so big. Nathan had a pretty good birthday I think. It started on the actual day by being woken up before daddy left to go to work so that we could open presents together. We did leave Joshua asleep so that there wouldn't be any fighting over presents. And yes, that is Christmas wrapping paper.

A little more than a week later we had his birthday party. He had been asking for a party where he could invite friends over since last year. We invited friends from school, church, and all the family over. We played with stickers, jumped on a bounce house,


hit a pinata (my niece Jillian broke it), and enjoyed cake and ice cream. It was a lot of work, but mostly because Richard and I finished off a few outstanding back yard projects in the weeks before the party. Nathan was very happy with it all. He thought that it was a great day and had a wonderful time throughout the entire party. He was even a fairly good host, for a 5 year old.




The funniest thing about all of it is that two weeks after the party, the rental company hasn't picked up the bounce house and we still have it in the back yard.

San Diego pictures

I finally published the entry on our San Diego trip. If you want to see the pictures, please scroll down past the "Goodbye to Mr. Gan" entry.

Good Bye to Preschool

Nathan's preschool had their end of the year party yesterday. Actually I should say their end of the year party for part of the class. The preschool is actually sponsered by the school district (not common) and is on the campus of a local elementary school. It is mainly for high functioning autistic kids, but they have a handful of typical kids to act as peer models. Nathan was one of the peer models and it his role (along with the other typical kids) to just be themselves and socialize with everyone in the class. It was very interesting, especially since half of the time I didn't know which kids were autistic and which were typical. I definetly want to have Joshua be in the same class, especially if Ms. Lara is still there; she was great. I also hope that Nathan has learned a little about accepting people who are different from him. I didn't tell him in the begining that there was anything different about any of the other kids in his class; I didn't want to prejudice him or get him confused. But it has come up a little bit in these last few months when he has asked why so and so doesn't talk very much, and other questions along the same line. I know that Nathan likes all his classmates and that he doesn't really see anything wrong with them. One of his favorite classmates is a little boy who is not as high functioning as some of the others. Nathan will usually say goodbye specifically to him and give him a hug. Tama usually just makes a noise and pushes Nathan away, but Nathan doesn't seem to mind.

Yesterday was a good bye party for the peer models and it was at a place called "Pump it Up," a small ware house type space with four inflatable party jumpers and other structures. It included a large slide, an obstacle course, and a multi use jumper along with a regular jumper. It was a lot of fun and we were all tired afterward. The party ended with pizza and other goodies. Just what a buch of 4 and 5 year olds love.

Goodbye to Mr. Gan

I have really enjoyed the preschool that Nathan goes to and I think that the teachers are wonderful. There are four regular teachers with Ms. Laura being his main teacher and Ms. Heather, Mr. Michael, and Mr. Gan are the other teachers. Today the class went to the park as a fieldtrip/ goodbye party for Mr. Gan who is moving on to bigger and better things. The day included a water baloon fight, flying kites, and playing on the playground. Everyone had a great time and we were all very hot and tired afterward.

The last picture is of Josh and the water fountain at the playground. I haven't seen a fountain placed so low to the ground before and I can only imagine that it is for the dogs that may come to the park, but it was perfect for my little boy.

San Diego Trip

For Richard's vacation time this year, we decided that we wanted to spend some time at home working on projects around the house, and then spend a few day in San Diego.

Sorry, I started this post ages ago and just haven't been able to finish it and now I'm feeling that I will just bore everyone describing the trip. So here are the pictures, we had a great time. We should have done one more day in between Sea world and the Animal Park but kept it as a rest day and not visited any parks. We went to San Diego Zoo, Sea World, and San Diego Wild Animal Park and by the end of it, the kids were animaled out.

Mother's Day

Just wanted to say a quick note about Mother's Day before it got too far past. I actually felt like I had several Mother's Days last week. On Monday night, Richard took the boys out to buy me some mother's day presents. Apparently they did a lot of walking and Richard didn't take the stroller so he ended up carrying the boys at the end. They were successful though, and the boys could hardly wait to show me what they had bought and Richard and I couldn't talk them out of it. After I had admired the gifts, Nathan pulled out the wrapping paper and he and Josh wrapped them. One was done in red Christmas paper and the other in silver and gold striped tissue paper.

On Friday, Nathan's preschool class had a Mother's Day Tea which was very lovely. Nathan's teacher, Miss Laura had prepared a lovely spread of sandwiches, fruit, salad, and desserts. Most was pre-bought (I'm so glad because she does so much already) but the students did help make the sandwiches by spreading on the filling and cutting the sandwiches into shapes with cookie cutters.

On the actual day, I got some lovely hand made items from each boy, a card from each of my guys, and a new gadget from Richard; I got a satellite radio. I was really surprised about the radio as I didn't think that there were any more gadgets left to buy, but it has been a lot of fun to have. The family favorite at this point is the children's music station. I get a kick out of how the kids will hear the beginning of a song and they will shout out excitedly what song or show or movie or character it is. And today Nathan impressed me when he heard a song sung by Kermit the Frog and insisted that it was Ernie (they are both voiced by Frank Oz). I decided not to try and explain.