School's back in session!

Yeah! The girls went back to school today. Andrew did ask early on in the day-"When will my girls be home?" He made it through the day fine though. He was purposely making funny faces in the pictures-what a goof! I feel a teeny-tiny bit bad that they have to go back in July, but that only lasts for a couple seconds....seriously, I love them dearly, but their bickering was starting to drive me crazy!

I was talking about the whole thing with my running partner, Diana. I was telling her that all these moms are saying how they are going to miss their kids when they go back to school...Diana thinks they are all lying.

Did I say a few days?.....

Sorry guys...in Arizona time that equates to a week. Anyway...all photos are now on the web. Didn't get them all captioned, but you'll get the main idea....we went to the beach. We are all beach bums. If we could afford to live on the beach and never work, we would sign up in a heartbeat.

I had every intention to finish journaling about our trip, but it's just not going to happen today. We have the girls' swim team banquet tonight. Andrew gets to go to the childcare room...have I mentioned how much I love that place? We also found out his friends are going to be in there tonight also, so all the more fun for him. After the banquet there is a going to be a dive-in movie. Andrew gets to join us for that. They set up this huge inflatable screen next to the pool, turn up the volume REALLY loud and the kids can swim and float around while watching the movie. We haven't heard what the movie is going to be...honestly, you can normally hear so little of it, it doesn't matter what the movie is. The kids just have fun being in the pool in the dark.

Tomorrow we are going to do a tour of BW3's in the AM, probably head to the pool for a couple hours and then "Meet the Teacher" night at school. The kids are very excited to meet their teachers. Maggie has a teacher who is new to the school this year, so we don't even know what she looks like. Christine has the only male teacher in the building and even though he was in the building last year, we don't really "know" him. The 6th graders switch classes, so I'm thinking we'll meet all the sixth grader teachers.

Rocky Point and other happenings

OK. I finished the second book of the series-New Moon. Steve is thinking that I am neglecting our family because of these books. I don't exactly see it that way. It is just the kind of book that you really want to see what happens next...this New Moon was not my favorite. It just kind of ....ended. I felt like the author was cut off mid-sentence and didn't finish her thought process...so on to the third book.







I have some photos of Andrew before dinner last night. He is such a cutie. Of course, I had to explain to him that the hat is not to be worn at the dinner table. He obliged me by taking it off...but then would get up to go the restroom and put it back on and then take it off-the hat ended up on top of our frig. I have been trying to embrace the "boy" in Andrew instead of fighting with it. The more boys I see, the more I see Andrew is perfectly normal...I was just so used to calm, mellow girls...amazing that I used to think Maggie was my "wild child". I have a few funny stories about Andrew but I need to journal about our Rocky Point trip before I forget everything....And yes, Andrew really does have two shirts on. He told me it was his "style"-not sure if the girls or Steve taught him that word.
Rocky Point...our drive down was fairly uneventful...gave Maggie some Dramamine before we left...we did not want a repeat of our drive to California. It did take us about 45 minutes to get 10 miles away-stop at Basha's for some last minute items, stop at McDonald's for a "quick" lunch-how do they get the slowest people on the planet to work for them? Anyway...fairly boring drive down to our final destination. We did drive through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (don't quote me on that name)on our way down. It looked very cool...but I'm not sure I would want to camp among the cactus right at the US border-snakes, scorpions, and people desperately trying to get in to the United States. We listened to the informational radio station as we were driving through-"Please report any suspicious activity to a park ranger..."-that would mean if you happen to see anyone crossing the border that shouldn't have. It all makes the bears at Cook Forest in PA look tame.
Anyway...we drove over the border into Mexico. The photo is the border crossing we drove through. We were not stopped-in fact we probably didn't even need to slow down. American citizens in mini-vans with money to spend in their country are definitely welcome. It was a little unnerving at first...Steve was worried about driving the speed limit (a Mexican jail cell is not a relaxing thought) and it was a very low speed limit-I think about 20 miles an hour. As soon as we crossed the border we knew we weren't in Kansas anymore...it was obvious that we had driven into a very poor town. Also, having all the signs in another language was weird-I haven't done any traveling outside of the US except to Canada. The poor border town did not prepare me for how poor Rocky Point is. Honestly, we do not realize how wonderful we have it in the US. A drive through that town and you would never question why so many Mexicans want to live in the US.
All that aside, the resort we stayed at was beautiful. Even though we were there for the beach our condo was laid out-beautiful tile floor, granite counter tops in the kitchen and baths, tile from floor to ceiling in the bathrooms, a complete wall of sliding doors so that our view was wonderful. We got everything unpacked and headed down to the beach. The tide was out so there were little tide pools everywhere. We were exploring and we saw a hermit crab in the tide pool. At first I was thinking cool...and then we realized that every shell in the tide pool was a hermit crab...the kids were still thinking cool...I was thinking GROSS. Those hermit crabs were bad enough when they were in a little box on a shelf in Myrtle Beach, but ALL OVER THE BEACH! Steve just laughed at me. He asked me what I thought was in the water at Myrtle...I knew there was a reason I prefer sitting on the shore reading my book over being in that water all day. There were cool shells everywhere,some little fishees in the water.
Our place also had a couple pools, a lazy river,a swim-up bar and a little outdoor restaurant right by the beach. That's where we had dinner the first night-completely American food-hamburgers and pizza. Steve and I were able to order, sit and relax while the kids swam in the pools, and go get them when the food came out. It was really nice to sit and listen to the ocean. The photo is the view from our room when we first arrived.


The next day we went in to town. Stopped at the grocery store-very weird going to a store where everything is in Spanish. We didn't stick out at all with our toe-head kids.... Then we headed to the fish market-what an experience. Surrounding the fish market are vendors. If you dare stop to look at anything they have, it is hard to get away. We were probably lucky...we were there as they were opening up-it seemed like a street-long flea market. Mexican kids must not wake up at the crack of dawn like our kids. Many of them had their kids with them. Honestly, getting out of the car and just trying to make our way to the fish market was interesting. All these guys trying to sell time-shares or condos or who-knows-what. The beach where we parked was all rocks-which must be how it got the name "Rocky Point". We did need to get some sand toys-we had no buckets to collect shells. We found some at one of the vendors-no Walmart anywhere to grab some sand toys for $5. The one thing that was funny was that a lot of the vendors had masks-the kind like on "Nacho Libre". Andrew was so wanting one of those-he ended up getting a fighting ring with a bunch of guys.

So, the second night we ate fish and shrimp. I'm not a shrimp eater-the girls and Steve finished that off. At the resort there were nice Weber gas grills. They had at least 12 of them cemented into the ground. You just had to call the front desk and ask them to send someone to turn it on. We did not know this ahead of time, but luckily from all our Myrtle Beach experience we had brought lots of food.



During the second day we were there, the kids played on the beach a ton. Collected shells for a while. Had fun playing in the waves. I am trying to post some of my favorite pictures on here, but check out the photo link for more photos and captions-give me a day or two to get them on there though.



On the fourth, my "28th" birthday-the kids weren't buying that one either-we headed down to the beach in the AM because it was low tide. It was really cool. Steve says the rocks were formed from volcanic lava-so if it's not true, talk to him about it. There were hermit crabs, of course. But we also saw tons of little fish-and some not so little. The coolest thing was spotting an octopus. I don't think I have ever seen one out of a tank. Christine was having fun trying to catch fish with her bucket. We also saw some crab. Of course, after seeing all these creatures I was even more excited to get in the water. The kids were worn out after a long morning on the beach. The photo shows how Andrew spent the afternoon.













That sums up our first two and a half days. I will have to finish the rest of our trip later!

I've been busy reading!

I know I should have already journaled about our Rocky Point trip, but I got sucked in by "Twilight." It is an amazing book. I could not put it down. Now I have to get busy reading the next two-you must read them in order-before the fourth one comes out in August!

Maggie's Birthday Party!

We celebrated Maggie's birthday a little early. We started the day with a swim meet. Luckily, the other team wasn't that big so we finished up by 11:00. I had brought a lot of the stuff we needed to the pool with us, so we just had to go home and change. (If you click on the picture of Christine's back, you might be able to see that the left side says "Eat my bubbles".)

Steve went to pick up the cake and get balloons-not the smartest idea in Arizona. A few of them actually lasted all day, but with the heat a bunch popped. Oh-I almost forgot about my treat bag dilemma. I called Current Thursday night and they couldn't even tell me for sure if my order had shipped-I normally have no problem with them. So, I had to resort to Plan B and search through Party City and Walmart for things to put in the treat bags. All turned out fine.

Maggie and her friends had fun playing in the pool and going down the waterslides. The games we planned did not exactly work out as planned, but the kids still had fun playing them. My oh-so-funny husband took the opportunity to push me in while I was next to the pool supervising one of the games. Getting in the pool definitely felt good, but he caught me off-guard!

We made Maggie wait until her real birthday to open cards and packages from our families. It was a great way to celebrate Maggie's real day since we couldn't be with everyone. She loved opening everything up and Andrew loved helping! We also celebrated her real day with some brownies and a movie of Maggie's choice. She picked "Spiderwick Chronicles"-the box said "a fantasy for all ages." It was a good movie, but did not take into account my scaredy-cat child.

High School Musical

Friday evening,June 27th, I took the girls to see High School Musical the play. We met girls from Maggie's girl scout troup. I'm not sure who had a better time-the moms or the girls. We were 8th row center-terrific seats. The play was great. Very similar to the movie-a new character, Jack Scott, acted as a narrator and they added another song. Confetti shot out at the end of show-the girls still have it in their room.

I will add a photo when I get a chance. My wonderful husband got me a laptop for my birthday! So I can journal while watching the kids in the pool, but I haven't uploaded any photos on this computer yet.

Rocky Point