August

August was warm and and we tried to cram in some fun things before school started up again.  We went to the beach one day, down in Alameda.  The boys and I had a great time building sandcastles and playing in the water.  Aaron tried to avoid the sand and sun and read a book :)  

 

See?  That's Aaron up there under the umbrella, reading.  He's not much of a beach bum :)  I forgot our camera and took most of these with my phone, so the quality isn't great.  Afterwards, we took a drive near the old Alameda airway.  It's small and the place where The Mythbusters do a bunch of their experiments.  The boys were hoping we'd see them there and get to watch an experiment, but no such luck!

 

A week later, we went to annual trip to see a Giants game with Aaron's lab.  The Giants lost, but we had a great time cheering and eating lots of junk food.

Just before school started again, we went to the Lawrence Hall of Science.  It's a hands-on kids museum full of fun and science related exhibits.  My boys love it!

I had a hard time keeping track of them.  They kept taking off in opposite directions!  Once they found the Creativity room, they settled in and played for a couple of hours.

Just before school started, we went to the Oakland Zoo.  It's much smaller than the San Francisco Zoo, but still fun.  We took the Skytrak and saw the lions, elephants, giraffes, yaks and a bunch of the other big animals from the sky.

 

  

We also got some goofy pictures :D

July

We went up to Oregon for the week of the 4th.  We had a great time visiting with family and I was absolutely terrible at taking pictures on this trip!  I didn't get many and most of those that I do have I won't be posting.  Several relatives don't like pictures of their kids on the internet, in whatever form, and I am respecting their wishes.

The trip didn't start out so easily.  Our van had been in the shop for a couple of days for them to replace our factory faulty radiator.  Well, due to a couple of snafus, the day came for us to leave and our car still wasn't fixed!  So we rented the cheapest car we could find and went anyway.  I think we were blessed in this anyway, because the rental place gave us a brand-new (only a thousand miles on it!) Honda to drive.  I'm not sure our van would have made the trip, even if the shop had finished with it.  And it was certainly much more gas efficient!  What we saved in gas, paid for half of the rental.

On the 4th, we went to the parade in Independance.  They do a great parade and fireworks show because they consider it "their day".  Here's a picture of the group of family and friends that came to join in the fun.

After the parade, we went back to the Brewsters' for BBQ and play/nap time for the kids.

During the BBQ, Samuel went out to our rental car to get a toy and locked our only set of keys in!  After specifically being told to be careful not to lock them in!  Thankfully, MomB has AAA and after a bit of a wait, a locksmith came and got the keys out.

That evening, we all went down to the waterfront park in Independance, for the fireworks.  What a great show!  That town always does a fantastic job .  Afterwards, we all loaded up and slowly made our way back to the Brewsters.

A couple of days later, our little family went to Lincoln City to visit my grandma.  We had a nice visit and then Aaron, the boys and I went out for lunch at Mo's.  It started to rain while we were eating, and had slowed to sprinkle by the time we were done. We didn't get to play on the beach this time, but did walk on the dock and enjoy the fresh air until it started raining again.

June

June was the end of school and start of summer vacation.  The last couple weeks of school, they each had a big program.  Samuel's was his band concert.  He played the drums this last year and liked it, but want to learn a different instrument next time.

Adam had a class play of "The Little Red Hen".  I helped to make the masks for the play and Adam did a great job playing the fox.

Later that month, I was in charge of our annual Relief Society Retreat.  I don't have pictures handy to share, but we had a great time.  We had a speaker, great food and a DJ and dancing at the end.  There's nothing like a bunch of women dancing around and blowing off steam :)

The rest of the month, we just relaxed and played in our pool.  After the hustle and bustle of the last couple of months, it felt nice to slow down. I think I slowed down too much, because I don't have very many pictures for the entire summer :S

May

The month started off with Adam's 7th birthday.  Odd numbered birthdays are quieter for us.  We keep it to just family and do fun things together.  It was raining that day, so we went bowling, and then home to have ice cream and presents.

 

 

  Adam has never been a cake fan (he just licks off the frosting), so we do large ice cream sundaes for his birthday treat.

A couple of weeks later, Aaron's dad was in town for business and stopped by to drop off birthday presents for Adam.  One of them was this awesome Lego Spaceship.  Adam put it all together by himself, and he loves it.

Also in May, the entire 4th grade at the boys' school had a big 3day/2night field trip to Point Bonita.  It's across the bay from us, so not too far, and beautiful.   Samuel and I both went, and I arranged playdates for Adam after school until Aaron could pick him up.

The weather was pretty good the entire time we were there - not too hot or too cold.  We were at the YMCA camp and had guided tours and activities.  I was a room mom for some of the girls and Samuel stayed in the boys cabins.

 

We got to go see an old army base/museum.  We got an up close look at some of the old missiles that were used during WWII.

 One of the cooler things we did was ride down with this missile shell's elevator into the silo underneath.  It was amazing and the kids were pretty giddy.  I have some great video clips that I'll have to put up later.

On our last day, we walked out to the Point Bonita Lighthouse.  What a fantastic view!  My camera doesn't do it justice.  We got to see the Golden Gate Bridge from the west side and you better a much better idea as to why it's called a gate :)

The lighthouse itself was closed, but we were able to walk around and take pictures.  It sticks out far enough that you can see up and down the coastline and see at least two other lighthouses!  Samuel and I had a great time, but were happy to get home.

April (the month, not me)

I am far behind in my journal keeping, so I'm just going to sum up what we've done over the last few months.  In April, we had Easter and Samuel's Science Fair.  Both ended up having all family members participate.

Easter was fun and simple.  The Saturday before, our ward had an Easter Egg Hunt and games.  The boys loved the different games of tag.  Adam was very sad when the handle on his basket broke.  He quickly got over it and settled down to eat his candy.

Sunday morning, we had a quick Easter Egg hunt before church and checked out our baskets before heading off to church. 

Later that month, was the school Science Fair.  Samuel did an experiment with Coca-Cola and Mentos.  When combined, they make a huge geyser and we all had fun with this test.

We got several kinds of soda to see what would get the best reaction and had a great, sticky time testing them out!

March

 I am the Enrichment Committee Leader at church, so I was in charge of the Relief Society Birthday Celebration, at the beginning of the month.  We had a luncheon and a service auction and had a good turn-out.  I did a multicolored party theme for decorations.  Here's a close-up of the purple table.

 

In March, we had some more beautiful days.  We spent a couple of them out at Cesar Chavez Park flying kites and soaking up more sunshine.  Adam is like a little heater, he is always so warm and it's hard to get him to wear a coat.

 

Samuel is a funny boy.  He insisted he would be warm enough without a coat, but as soon as we got on top of the windy hill, he dove for cover under Aaron's sweater.

Adam had his first school play.  It was called, "The Mitten" and it was about some forest animals taking shelter in a mitten that a girl had lost in the forest.  The mitten got so stretched out from all the animals hiding inside, that once all the animals left, the mitten was the same size as the girl.  Adam played the bear.  I had a terrible time getting a good picture.

Ben and Amanda and their kids came for a visit.  We had a great time hanging out, eating lots of food, and playing lots of games.

There was lots of dressing up, swords and guns.  You see, we have boys.  Anything girly in our house comes from the little girls I babysit :)

January and February

Since this is also our family journal, I'm going to sum up the last few months.  January and February were both busy and boring.  I was babysitting a lot, running a carpool for a friend that was out of the country for two months and trying to keep up with our family needs.   My typical daily schedule went like this:

7:15 am - Get Up
7:30 - Aubrie gets dropped off
8:20 - Drop off Samuel at school
8:40 - Get back home
9:10 - Drop off Aaron at work and Adam at school
9:50 - Get back home/do chores and/or run errands
10:45- On T/Th Park day for Aubrie
12:30- On M/W/F drop off Aubrie at preschool
1pm - Pick up Twins at their preschool and take them home
1:45 -  On Wed pick up boys from school, other wise -Get home/run errands/do chores
2pm - On Wed Fiona gets dropped off (babysitting)
3:10 - Pick up boys from school on most days
3:30 -  On M/W/F Pick up Aubrie from Preschool
4:00 - Help kids with homework
5:30 - Aubrie (and Fiona on Wed.) get picked up
6 pm - Dinner
6:30 - Clean-up and prep for next day
8pm - Bedtime for boys
9:30 - Time boys actually settle down and go to sleep
11pm- My bedtime

It made for a busy day (especially Wednesday), but not horrible.  The carpooling of the twins ended when my friend came back from her trip.  It rained a lot, but there were lots of beautiful days too, here in Northern California.  One day we went out to Little Farm, a local state park, and fed the farm animals and went on a short hike around a small lake.  It felt good to soak up the sunshine and get some fresh air.

 

Log full of turtles!

 

Climbing trees

So, no big events, but lots of just keeping busy with life!

December and Christmas

December started out busy since I was in charge of our ward's Relief Society Wreath Making activity the first weekend of the month. It was a lot of work and preparation, but it went well. We had a lovely musical program, then a luncheon followed by the actual wreath making. There were lots of requests for us to do the same thing again next year - so that told me it went great!

The rest of the month was all of the extra preparation for Christmas. Samuel's class did another skit and Adam's class needed help with their party. Nothing major happened, just lots of fun things to do in the spirit of the season. The boys had school all the way up until the 23rd! It was nice to not have them underfoot while I was doing last minute shopping, and it's made the whole season seem longer. They go back to school tomorrow, and are not very happy about it. It's going to be hard to get back into our routine.

I've been very lazy about getting pictures up, and I'm sorry about that. Aaron had the week after Christmas off unexpectedly, so we've been enjoying all our free time together as a family.

I took appallingly few pictures this year, but here are some of them:



Our tree was crammed into our living room.



Samuel got lots of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards - that's the popular card game for kids his age.



Adam got his Lego Ninjago spinner set that's he's been asking for since his birthday.



They both got these magnetix sets and love them! They've been making all sorts of interesting things with these.



We all got nerf guns and have had several battles the last few weeks :D It's been lots of fun and we keep finding darts in weird places.



Aaron got lots of new Magic The Gathering cards and these headphones for playing on the xbox. We all love them, since he can now play his video games in the evening without disturbing the whole house.

I mainly got some pretty jewelry and books this year. We also got some new board games for the whole family.

We had a quiet Christmas day with just us and no traveling. I made a ham dinner with all the fixings and lots of yummy desserts (fudge, magic cookie bars, choc. covered cherries, etc.) and we pigged out for a week on it!

We hope you all had a great holiday season, too!