Happy Anniversary

Happy Anniversary to my handsome husband!  Seven years!!

Had a great date night dinner at the Village Pub.  Many thanks to my sister and parents for watching the kids!!   

 

Welcome Home Tia Erica!

Tia Erica is home, yay!!  The kids picked up right where they left off with her in December- it's just amazing how comfortable they are with her, considering their general extremely shy nature (A and C that is).  They woke up asking for Tia Erica first thing in the morning, so we got even more Tia time today.   Here they dragged her back to our little craft room and worked on finger painting together.   SOO happy that she is home for the entire summer to play!

Happy Birthday Grandpa Bill!

We are wishing Grandpa Bill a very Happy Birthday today!!  We hope that you are having a wonderful day and we look forward to celebrating with you when you are home.

We had to make cupcakes this morning with all of the birthday talk....oh so messy, but such fun!

Pre-K Graduation Day!

It's crazy I know, but today was a big day in our house- GRADUATION from Pre-Kindergarten into Kindergarten for the fall.   As the room mom, I was in charge of the small celebration after the ceremony, so we've been busy prepping and baking all week long.  We have therefore had quite the anticipation build up of this day for while.   Jake was actually excited to get dressed up for his special day, and he did a great job at the ceremony.  As I had the girls on my lap, I couldn't see much, so I hope that a video comes around soon, but I was proud when he went up for his diploma and his teacher's comment for him was "Jake will be remembered for always being so positive"....love that about him!   While there were 17 kids in the class, no one really wanted to help me with the party, so I'm so glad that today my parents were able to be there to help setup and clean up- so thanks again Nana and Granddad!

 

I bought the Giving Tree book for each student, and the teachers wrote nice memories and sweet thoughts in each book as a memento.  

 Of course I had to do some personalized graduation hat cookies!

 Look how big that hat is!!! 

 The ceremony program.  If you can't see Jake's picture on the "when I grow up, I want to be...", he wrote a policeman and a dad.

  Some pics with his best buddies:

 

My Dad caught some of the special ceremony moments on video:

He also caught some cute pics of the day too:

 

Art Class

The girls and I have started going to a little art class once a week.   It turns out that a few of the moms whom I met on maternity leave two years ago now, are also taking the class, so it was really fun.  A and C didn't want to leave the painting table of course, but the glue project finally lured them away so that other kids could paint.   It's going to be a fun class for us for sure this summer.

 

Coyote Point

Given that I'm now home, I decided to join Coyote Point again this year- the girls are old enough to enjoy the animals, and the park/hiking areas around the museum are also excellent.  So we headed there yesterday...went pretty well, although I'm learning that too many times in and out of the car in a short period of time isn't so great for the girls....we got in and out of the car something like 16 times yesterday!

My 1000th blog post!

It's totally bizarre to think that this is the 1000th blog post I've written for our family blog.  I had started this blog about 4 and a half years ago as some friends of mine had created some, and were encouraging me to give it a try.   Being somewhat crafty, I had always imagined doing actual scrap booking as my method of documenting the lives of our children and our family adventures.  But, man, that takes so much time, energy and $$!!   This has turned out to be just the best scrapbook I could ever give my kids, with each year printed out in physical book form at the end of the year.  I've got close to half of a bookshelf now with all of my blog books, and I imagine that someday soon Jake will want to start reading through them.  This has also been such a great tool to share how our little ones are developing for my sister who is far away, as well as the rest of our family on the East Coast or in Central California.   So hello to all of you, and thank you for caring to check in on our family from time to time. 

According to Blogger, these are our top visited blog posts of all time:
Becoming homeowners: http://the-goines-family.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-home-owners.html

Jake's guitar solo: http://the-goines-family.blogspot.com/2011/07/where-did-my-child-come-from.html

34 Week twin belly bump post: http://the-goines-family.blogspot.com/2012/03/34-week-twin-pregnancy-update.html

36 Week twin post: http://the-goines-family.blogspot.com/2012/04/last-belly-pic-365-weeks.html

A and C's birth: http://the-goines-family.blogspot.com/2012/04/welcome-addison-and-colbie.html

 I hope to keep this up as much as I can now that I'm home.

Day #1 of being a SAHM was fantastic!

I had such fun yesterday without having a tight schedule to run our day.   I made homemade playdoh in the morning (thank you Lizzie for the most thoughtful gift of supplies and instructions!) that we all played with after breakfast.  After taking Jake to school, the girls and I did one errand, than literally I asked our car what the nearest park was, and just followed the map to a new amazing park that we've never been to.  There was a great water play area, and sandbox, and no one was there (we're going to be the first ones out to most places these days as we're already in the car dropping off Jake!).   Without having to rush home to relieve a nanny, we actually got to go play at another park with Jake after picking him up in the afternoon for bubbles, and swing time together to get the last bit of energy out of all three of them.  
I found myself multiple times yesterday, in the moment, just feeling so lucky to be holding Addy's hand while she went down the slide instead of in my cube at work, or scooping up sand with Colbie instead of sitting on the train commuting.   My patience has tripled without being rushed every day!!  The only hilarious mishap of the day was after I changed C and A at the park out of their swimsuits, I couldn't find one of the dirty diapers- so I was running around the park bench asking the girls if they saw it anywhere, and Colbie points to me.  I'm confused, so I look down and I catch something out of the corner of my eye- oh hello dirty diaper- it was stuck to my behind!   oh well...my new source of laughs! 

Beach Day

Great way to kick off summer!!