Raindrops on Roses

What an answer to prayer-- we've had lots of rain days this season! Thank you, Lord!

A Tribute to the Equinox

Eleven years ago, when we found out we were pregnant with our first baby, we made the easy decision to trade in Dave's little pick-up truck for a new, roomy SUV that could haul car seats and strollers.  It was one of the first major life changes we made that acknowledged the new stage of parenting we'd be entering.  And for over a decade this was a good car for us.

But, as all 11 year old cars are prone to do, it started requiring more money than we were willing to dump into it.  It left me stranded and calling AAA two times last year.  It had a host of little and big things, from the transmission to the key fabs, that were no longer working well on it.  We've been saving up and researching for a while and we set Spring Break as our new car shopping time.

Here is a little look back at some fun moments in the Equinox:    

 Shortly after we bought it, here is my car and my pregnant belly at the coast.

 This is the day we loaded our new family of FOUR up in the Equinox and brought Delia home from the hospital.

This is one of the many Christmas trees it carried home for us from the tree farm.

And here is our last goodbye at the car lot.  This car carried my babies around in their various stages of car seats and boosters for years.  It had milk sippie cups go bad in it, it had kids puke in it.  It certainly saw its share of both tears and dance parties.  This car mowed down a coyote on a dark night in Napa and didn't even show any damage.  It made hundreds of trips to school and took us on countless outings.  For 11 years, this car kept us safe in all our travels and we are thankful for it.  

But, similar to when we bought it, we acknowledge that we are in another new stage of life.  Since all my car does is drive back and forth to school, we don't need a big car any longer.  In fact, something small, but comfortable, that gets 40 miles to the gallon is pretty appealing!  So, our new car is a zippy, little, subcompact Honda.  Because it is one of the cheaper cars that Honda makes, our budget allowed for all sorts of bells and whistles that I've never had before!  My mind is a little boggled to also realize that while the car we traded in brought our babies home from the hospital, the new one we bought last week will the car those babies learn to drive in just a few years!

Spring Break Staycation

For our Spring Break, we decided to try something totally new: a complete Staycation.  This Spring Break had a new car purchase in it, so we decided to refrain from spending any money on vacations or even day trips.  Instead, I filled each of our days with friends the girls have been asking to see and playdates we've been meaning to have.  

So, I give you this Friends Post, which is the way we spent a lovely week off of school:

 Okay, this is not technically from Spring Break, but it's a friend picture I wanted to include.  Ella went away for a whole weekend to a church camp.  She had a blast!  She was put in a cabin with lots of her good friends and kept busy with all sorts of fun activities.  It was the longest I have ever gone without talking to her and I'm so happy she's the kind of kid who loves an away-from-home adventure.

 Right before Spring Break, our school hosted its annual Open House and Spring Program.  We always enjoy the opportunity to get tours of the girls' classrooms and chat with their teachers.  The program is only for kids in grades kindergarten through 3rd, which means we are officially done.  Delia and her classmates sang their Fruit of the Spirit songs wholeheartedly and ended our years of Spring Programs on nice note!  (Do you like that pun I just did there?)  Above is Delia with two of her good friends Kate and Sara.

Our Spring Break kicked off with a morning with long-distance friends, Heidi and her kids.  They happened to be in town and were kind enough to squeeze a visit with us into their schedule.  We were so blessed to catch up with these dear friends and hear all about how life is going now that Heidi's chaplain husband is deployed.

Another night I got a playdate with some of my friends!  :)  My good buddy Jetta hosted a Girls Night Out Badminton Tournament and Movie Night for her birthday.  These ladies were a riot and this night was SO fun!  During our tournament we had every kind of weather: blinding sun, extreme wind, even down-pouring rain!  Competitive Jetta made us play through it all!  I am blaming the crazy weather, and not my sub-par badminton skills, on my team's (The Badminton Babes) last place finish.

 Over Spring Break, our youth pastor and his wife had their baby-- a perfect and sweet baby boy named Judah.  He actually came a week early and he actually disrupted the Easter weekend preaching schedule quite a bit, unexpectedly doubling Dave's workload.  But, all worked out just fine!  And what joy we had spending a morning meeting him and showering his wonderful parents with some gifts and meals.  Ella is getting hooked on this "holding newborns" thing and would hardly share him! :)

The girls ask me often to let them have friends sleepover and, you guys, I just don't feel like I have the energy for this in a normal work week.  Spring Break was the perfect time to finally get this sleepover on the calendar.   It ended up being a lot of fun--  with a lot of playing, another movie night, and even an impromptu dance party.

 Delia had her friend Kate over and it was so sweet to listen to them reading books to each other for an hour in the bunk beds they shared.

 Ella had her friend Emily sleep over and they felt so grownup sharing the little guest house, where they listened to music, played cards and slept for the night. They also enjoyed rollerblading around our church parking lot the next day.

Our Spring Break's Grand Finale was a Saturday morning with another good friend, Rachel and her boys Evan and Zane.  We met at the Home Depot to make butterfly houses together and then spent some time at the park.

On the Sunday before school started up again, we reminded the girls of the big Spring Break trip we made to San Diego last year.  We asked which break was better, expecting that obviously they'd choose the one that had theme parks, koala bears, and killer whales in it.  They did not!  A break full of relaxation, movie watching, game playing, book reading and LOTS of time with friends was just as satisfying they reported!  And I think I may agree with them.

These Easter Greetings are Only Two Weeks Late...

Happy Easter, dear friends and family!  We hope you had a joyful day of celebrating God's love and grace and the miracle of life after death!

Here are a few shots of our Easter festivities:

Dying the Easter eggs. 

Getting dolled up in our Easter Sunday best. 

Sharing fellowship, ham buns, and a mega Easter egg hunt with our church family. 

Discovering our love for holding newborn babies on one of the newest members of our church VM family. (Fun fact about this growing family: it is impossible for them to get and keep any sort of updated whole family picture.  There were over 60 in attendance on Easter, 2 were newborns, and at least 2 more babies are on the way this year!)  

Realizing that my girls and their friends in this big family are the "older kids" in the bunch!  With all the new babies (many being born to the kids we had in our high school youth group 10-12 years ago!), there is a new crop of littles.  Not going to think about where that puts Dave and I on the age scale! ;)

Wicked Weekend in the City

Knowing how important quality time is for Dave, I gave him the gift of a fancy date in the city for his birthday back in December.  We went on this date last weekend and it was wonderful!  

  

We stayed at our first 5 star hotel, the Fairmont.  It was fun to explore all the luxury and history this SF landmark had to offer, but we realized we are definitely Best Western kind of people! :)  When we called ahead to inquire about parking, they told us that since we were guests, they'd be happy to valet park our car...for a mere $98 a night!  We found an overnight parking garage a few blocks away that was willing to provide this same service (minus the valet) for $30.  Score 1 for the cheap, Dutch couple. 

On the rooftop garden, it was cool to watch the cable cars rumbling up and down the street.  And in the hotel's hallways it was fun to take in rows and rows of photographs showing all the presidents, world leaders, and movie stars who have stayed at the Fairmont.  I snagged the below pic of a favorite singer, Ella Fitzgerald, for our oldest daughter. 

The highlight of this weekend was the show I booked us tickets for back in November-- Wicked!  I have only ever heard great things about this musical and even still our expectations were exceeded!  The music was fantastic.  The performers were amazing.  I do believe this is even the Broadway cast on tour.  The sets and production blew us away.  Seeing it in another historical landmark, the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco, was pretty neat too.

 (This is the ornate ceiling at the Orpheum.)

With our car tucked away in an over-night garage, we limited our outings to ones we could walk to.  So, the morning after Wicked, we spent some time wandering around the nearby Grace Cathedral.  With features like these gold doors depicting Bible scenes, this place was beautiful!  We spent a lovely morning sipping coffee in the cathedral's prayer garden, talking and listing to the cable cars clang up and down the street right beside us.

Friends from work gave me tons of suggestions of favorite places to eat.  On Friday night was had a fabulous, authentic Italian dinner at an intimate cafe that had about 10 tables in it, and a line out the door by the time we left.  On our way home Saturday we stopped for lunch at the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen and gobbled up fancy grilled cheese sandwiches and a bowl of crispy maple brussels sprouts.  It was DELICIOUS!  Definitely recommend!

Ella was at a church camp for the weekend and Delia spent the night with some friends.  We're so thankful for even this small window of time to reconnect and do special and super fun things together.  Life has been busy and our schedules often have us just passing each other.  Dave and I probably talked more in these 2 days than we have in a month.  I'll always remember our fancy weekend in the city, and already have my kids singing all the Wicked Soundtrack songs!

Ella the Actress

As you may remember from a post I wrote last year, the 4th and 5th grades traditionally put on a huge stage production at our school.  The 4th graders serve as the choir and the 5th graders get the acting parts.  Ella has known about and looked forward to this for years and was excited to be given the role of Mary, Tom's cousin, in the musical Tom Sawyer.  Totally on her own, she even picked up and read the Mark Twain book to better understand the story and her part!  Ella has loved every piece of this process-- the try outs, the practices, the lines (which she memorized effortlessly and with zero help from us at home), the solos, the costume, the make-up!, and the 3 performances they've done for our elementary school, the neighbor school, and all the parents, over the past 2 days.

 Mary, Aunt Polly and Sydney taking turns singing their frustrations out in the song "What Do You Do with A Boy Like That?"

 Mary watching her cousin get in trouble yet again in the classroom.

Rousing her mischievous cousin from bed after his late night in the grave yard.

 Mary reading her aunt and brother the note Tom left before going on his big rafting adventure with the boys.

 Sobbing at Tom and Huck's funeral, when the town thought they had drown in the river.

 She's REALLY upset. :)

Singing "Hallelujah" with the choir when it is realized the boys are alive!

 Tom and Becky have fallen in love, the bank robbers have been caught, and all is well in Hannibal, MO.  A reprisal of the big opening number closes the show out.

 Curtain Call!  Ella said hearing the big applause and cheers from the audience was always her favorite part.  I think she's hooked! 

 With her buddy, Emma, who played Aunt Polly.

 The whole 5th grade cast.

 Friends and flowers!

And some frozen yogurt with the family to celebrate a job very well done.

I totally get that I only contributed half of Ella's genes and I am so happy to see that Dave's love for the spot light seems to have trumped my stage-fright in the genetic make up of our daughter.  But, I am still SO delighted and proud to see my girl doing something I could and would never do.  Singing solos and speaking on stage in front of a packed auditorium!  And doing it perfectly and with no nerves!  How awesome when our kids surprise us like this.  What other amazing things are these girls going to do?!  I can't wait to find out!

Phone's "Available Storage" Boosted! (A Catch-Up Post)

 Time to clean out my phone and dump a bunch of random photos on the blog! :)  I've been okay about keeping our big outings and events recorded, but here are some of the smaller moments and memories from Winter turning into Spring 2016...

Every Thursday, while Ella does her piano lesson, I get to play with these cuties!

 Ella had to read a biography and make a diorama about its subject for school.  She chose Corrie Ten Boom and was deeply impacted, as anyone who reads her story is, by Corrie's faith and testimony.  Thanks to Uncle Kyle, for gifting her with the book!  I thought her diorama, which she did 100% by herself, was great!

 The new craze here is Kendama.  This is an old-school ball in cup/yo-yo toy that surprisingly consumes a great deal of time!  Delia was given an old Kendama by a friend and when it broke, she wanted a new one ASAP.  The kids are SO into this trend, Delia gave me an entire Saturday of yard work and week pulling, just to earn a new one!  It is cute to see all the kids at recess standing in groups working on mastering the tricks.

Every year we look forward to Almond Blossom and its reminder that Spring comes early here in the Central Valley.  You already saw our blossom pics (plus this one more off my phone, below), but here are a few peeks at how we celebrated at the Almond Blossom Festival this year.  We went to $1 Ride Night at the carnival for the first time and had a blast running into so many students and friends.  The girls also continued to amuse and confuse us with their passion for spinny rides.  At the parade a few days later, the girls ditched their old mom and dad to sit with some friends.  We're moving into a new, more grown-up stage of life for sure!  Still figuring out how I feel about it. ;)

 Almost-Spring weather is different every day.  Some days it can't make up its mind and gives us both sunshine and rain.  It seems like we've had LOTS of rainbows lately.  This is a picture of one Ella snapped on the way to school one morning.

And this week I taught one of my favorite units, using snail activities to get the kids excited about the two topics "Signs of Spring" and "Patience".  A highlight is always the snail painting, and this year's class looooved it more than any other!  Most of my kids used their full free play time to just hang out in the art center watching, laughing at, and squealing over these slimy friends leaving colorful paint trails all over the art papers.  And the snails Ella and Delia wrangled from our garden were a hardy bunch this year, they all survived and earned prettier, more decorated shells, for their artistic efforts! How fun is my job?!