Our New Addition

Danny finally gave me something that I have wanted for a long time now. We figured with Alyssa turning 5 in a couple of months that it was a good time for it. Here is our new addition...

Danny found it on Craigslist. When we were going over to look at it, I didn't have high expectations. We had a 2 month period awhile back where we looked at a lot of pianos that were advertised on Craigslist and none of them felt right to me. When I sat down to play this piano, I felt a lot better about it than I had with any in the past. It is badly in need of a tuning job, but it sounds good to me considering. We think it will be a good piano for us as we are teaching our kids how to play and keeping the little ones from touching it. It is a definate improvement from the keyboard that I have been using to practice for the past 5 years.
Alyssa has shown a lot of interest in the piano recently and since this one has been in our home, she has asked me numerous times to teach her new song to play. I will probably find her some piano books to give her for Christmas and then start teaching her for real after that. So far it has mostly been "Chopsticks" and some other simple songs like that.

Another 5K

I ran another 5K on Saturday. We started training for this race during the first week of August. Our original plan was to run it in under 30 minutes and that's what we attempted to train for. Due to our vacation and Rachel, my ruinning buddy, getting sick 3 weeks before the race, we lowered our expectations and decided that just doing better than the last race was good enough for us. However, I think both of us thought in our minds that we might not even do better than last time. Ashley giving me a good luck hug.
Because this race was in October, they invited participants to dress up on costumes. Rachel and I laughed about it and wondered how anyone could run a 5K in a costume. Apparently it can be done.

All I know is that I would not have wanted to run in this costume.

Here I am crossing the finish line (Gray shirt, black pants).

Around the 1 mile marker, we realized that our original goal of finishing in under 30 minutes was actually a possibility. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. My finish time was 30:20, just over my original goal. I was a little bit dissappointed, but still happy that I cut 57 seconds off from the last race. Here I am after the race.

Rachel is a good exercise buddy for me. It's nice having someone to motivate me to exercise daily. We had planned on this being our last race for awhile, but having finished so close to 30 minutes, we are thinking about running another race in November to see if we can reach our goal of under 30 minutes.

Playdough

We are going through a playdough phase in our house. I can't remember how it started. I just remember something happening that encouraged me to pull out the long hidden playdough. However, when I found it and pulled it out, I realized that my playdough stash was all dried out. So I used a recipe that Gawbie passed on to us a long time ago and made our own homemade playdough (it is a recipe that uses kool-aid for the coloring). I even let Alyssa pick out the color. She picked her favorite color, purple, which also happened to be grape flavored. It turned out pretty good and has provided for hours of entertainment since. Alyssa loves that it smells good.
We had these playdough toys with the dried-up stash that we had gotten in a happy meal or something a long time ago. The girls love using them to make "cookies" and faces in their dough.

It makes a big mess of our kitchen floor and table, but they sure love playing with it.

Our Trip to California

WARNING! This is a very long post with a lot of pictures. It's hard to choose your favorites when there are 200 pictures to choose from.

Danny had a conference in San Diego this past weekend, so we took advantage of his company paying his airfare and we went along to take our girls to Disneyland for the first time. Here they are dressed and ready for an exciting day.

Grandma and Grandpa Miner went along to enjoy the day with us. They have season passes and we enjoyed having two more adults along to help out with the girls. Here we are on the tram ride from the parking lot.
After walking from the tram drop off to the front gate(carrying Ashley), we all decided it was worth the money to rent a stroller for the day. Grandma and Grandpa were nice enough to pay for it with their pre-paid Disney cash card. Here we are waiting for them to return. As you can see from the picture, Alyssa and Ashley are in awe of all there is to look at.

Before we got there, Alyssa had told us that she was most excited to ride the teacups ride. Here is she is fulfilling her wish.

Her favorite princess is Snow White. When we started talking about Disneyland a couple of months ago, we told her that she could wear a princess dress to the park. She told us a couple of weeks later that she wanted to wear a Snow White dress. Fortunately, we found one at a consignment sale at the end of August. At Disneyland, we had to do the Princess Walk in order to meet the princesses. We were fortunate that Snow White was one of them.

I included this one too because I thought it was cute that Sleeping Beauty got Alyssa to hold her dress out like a princess.

Of course, the girls had to meet Mickey Mouse too. The wait was a lot shorter to meet Mickey than it was to meet the princesses.

This picture doesn't have anything to do with our day at Disneyland, I just thought that Alyssa looked like a little model in it.

Grandpa was nice enough to push the stroller around all day and stay with Ashley for all of the rides that she was too little to ride (we were sad to discover that she was just one inch too short to ride everything that Alyssa could. We were happy, however, that she could ride as much as she could. One of the benifits of having tall children).

Ashley was most excited about going on the train. We went on it right after she woke up from a two hour nap in the stroller(which Grandpa so kindly held back on two wheels so that she could sleep laying down for most of that two hours)

I wanted to get a picture in front of the famous Sleeping Beauty Castle, but there was too much excitment to start riding rides at the beginning of the day and the front of the castle was blocked off at the end of the day, so we had to settle for our picture in front of the Disneyland sign on the hill.

We were glad that Grandma and Grandpa came with us, even if the girls don't look very happy abour it in this picture (they were pretty tired and clingy at this point).

The very next day, we headed to Pasedena to meet up with Grandpa Wheeler, Aunt Maryn, and cousin Robbie. We started with lunch at McDonalds. We were going to go to a park, but it was a cold and drizzly day, so we opted for an indoor playplace. After lunch, we went to a children's museum, called Kidspace. All three kids had a blast.

It made me laugh to see how creepy Ashley looks crawling out of this ant hole.

Alyssa crawled out so fast that I made her get back in it so that I could get a picture of her.

They loved riding these little tricycles. Alyssa liked driving Robbie. Robbie didn't like that so much.

I think Danny was making them laugh in this shot by pretending to be a spider (they are standing on a spider web). We had a fun day with some of the Wheeles and both kids fell asleep on the way home.

That night, Danny left us to go to the Dodgers/Padres game at Dodger Stadium with his Dad and brothers. He spent the night at his brothers house and then went on to his Conference the following morning. We missed having him around, but were glad that he was finally able to get some relief from his cat allergy (My parents own a cat who was banned from the house while we were there, but that still wasn't enough to help Danny).

On Thursday, we headed back to the Disneyland Resort to go to the other Amusement Park, California Adventure. Alyssa was excited to ride some more rides.

She got to meet another princess.

She got picked to dance on the stage for the High School Musical Steet Performance.

There wasn't as much to do at this park, especially for Ashley, so it was a much slower paced, relaxing day. We were worried when we started the day off with two grumpy, sleep-deprived kids, but they got better once they saw all the fun stuff around them. We stayed even later this night so that we could watch a "World of Colors" light/water show over the water in this park. Ashley fell asleep in her stroller during the show and Alyssa fell asleep on the tram ride back to the car. They both slept all the way home and didn't wake up on the way to their beds.

We spent a peaceful morning at Grandma's house on Friday and then headed off to the beach after lunch. It was a nice beach day considering it was the end of September. We were fortunate that Friday was the first day of a week-long heat wave. The water was a bit cold, but that didn't stop Ashley from getting soaked. Alyssa liked playing in the sand. I helped her build a sand castle.

There were plenty of feathers around as there were plenty of seagulls. 50 of them enjoyed sharing our caramel popcorn that we left unguarded when I had to take Alyssa to the bathroom. It was probably one of the most expensive snacks they had ever gotten into as it was leftover from Disneyland. I had flashbacks to another beach trip that I took with Danny when we were engaged, when we watched a flock of seagulls inhale a bag of chips that belonged to some people next to us. It was one of the first good laughs that we remember sharing together(you know, the ones where you laugh so hard that you cry). This time I was on the recieving end of the laughs which were heard by the people sitting next to us. Alyssa and Ashley had fun chasing the birds away with me.

We spent Saturday recovering from our busy week and flew back yesterday. It was a really fun week and Alyssa's newest favorite place to go is Disneyland. Her favorite rides were "It's a Small World"(Disneyland) and the Grizzly River Rapids ride(California Adventure).

Disney On Ice

One of the benefits of Danny's job is that we get to go see some fun shows for free. This was one of those shows. It was especially fun this time because it featured Disney Princesses this year and it was right before our trip to Disneyland. The girls loved the show.

Ashley especially liked the characters (the animal kind that had headpieces over their real faces).
Alyssa loved the princesses (especially Snow White, her favorite).

Going to this show added to an already busy week, but the girls loved it and we were glad that Danny's friend gave us the tickets.

Chargers vs Chiefs

For our Anniversary this year(on July 26th), I gave Danny a gift in which he got to choose between ordering NFL Sunday Ticket or going the the Chargers/Chiefs Monday Night game in Kansas City. He thought about it for about a month (during which time I think he asked the opinion of numerous other football fans) and decided that he wanted to go to the game. We left our girls with some good friends and headed off for Kansas City on Monday. We had a blast. I had never been to an NFL game before so I didn't really know what to expect. Danny found us some pretty decent seats about 20 rows back at about the 48 yrd line on the Chargers side. Here we are down by the field in our Chargers attire.

Here is the view from our seats.

It was quite an experience from the moment we drove into the parking lot to the moment we drove out, especially after we left the comfort of our darkly tinted car. I told Danny that I felt like I was on my mission again in Brazil and trying to ignore the stares and comments being directed at me. There must have been like 500 Chiefs fans to every 1 Chargers fan. However, we learned that if you didn't bug them, then they didn't bug you. Most of the people sitting around us were nice, which was fortunate. The feeling in the stadium at the beginning before the players came out was amazing. This video doesn't even capture a fraction of it, but I wanted to post it anyways to show what we had around us and a little bit of what we saw and heard.

They darkened all of the stadium lights and shot off some fireworks and had a video presentation of how great the Chiefs fans are. The crowd went crazy throughout it. The mascot even rode a zipline into the stadium. If you noticed the one other Chargers fan besides me in the video, he caused quite a stir. He was very vocal and mouthing off to the Chiefs fans behind him and they nearly broke out in a fight numerous times. The game got much better after both groups left.

The game was a lot of fun to watch, even with the rain that started at the beginning of the second quarter. We were so disappointed when the Chargers were playing from behind most of the game. It made for an exciting ending when they nearly caught up. At least we didn't have to deal with angry, drunk Chiefs fans as we walked back to our car, just happy ones. We couldn't believe how loud it was in the stadium. I had to plug my ears at times because I could feel them vibrating. The fans there really got into it and it was kind of fun to see. Their indian chant got really old though.

This is a picture from our seats at the end of the game. You can't really tell in the picture, but we are soaking wet. The weather forecast said the rain wasn't supposed to start until after midnight, so we didn't bother bringing ponchos. We wish we would have brought them anyways because we shivered all the way through the fourth quarter and we were so cold by the time that we got back to our hotel room. We were glad that we got to go to the game, even if our team lost. It was so much fun.

Haircuts, Stitches, and Cavities

The other day as I was making dinner, I heard the girls giggling. I thought to myself, "How cute!" Then I was curious to know what they were doing, so I glanced over at them. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary at first glance, but something caught my eye so I did a double take and saw this on the table and Alyssa holding scissors.I said "Are you cutting your hair?" and then realized that the hair was too curly and light and then asked "Are you cutting Ashley's hair?!?" Alyssa immediately knew she was in trouble by the tone of my voice. She handed over the scissors and disappeared upstairs as I told her never to cut hair again. As I returned back to dinner I said a quick prayer of thanks that it wasn't worse. And with Ashley's hair, I couldn't even figure out where Alyssa cut it from.

On Friday, I woke up with some kind of stomach bug and spent the day on the couch (Let it be noted that I think Mom's should have been born with immunity to any illness as there is never anyone to take care of us when we are sick). I spent the morning watching Dora and Princess movies as the girls wouldn't let me have a turn to watch what I wanted without complaint (fortunately I had a good book close by when my eyes could focus on it). Finally around 3pm they disappeared upstairs and were playing quietly. I thought to myself, "Finally, some peace." After 30 minutes I finally decided to go and check on them. Ashley was sitting up on the counter in our bathroom getting into who knows what and Alyssa was laying on her bed. I asked Alyssa what was wrong and she told me that her ear was hurting. She was reluctant to let me look (for good reason) but I finally talked her into letting me look but not touch. I moved the hair away from behind the ear and noticed some pus. I lifted the ear a little and the ear lifted away from the head to expose maybe a 1/2 gash. I let go quickly and started questioning her to find out what happened. She claims that she did it with one of my earrings, we still don't know how. I quickly called Danny and told him what happened to which he replied that he was on his way. He knew I was in no condition to do Urgent Care with both girls. Alyssa came home with 5 stitches and an antibiotic. Needless to say, it was an awful day.

I know the picture is not very clear, but you are looking at the back of her right ear. The black things are the stitches.

That same night after Danny and Alyssa got home from the doctor, Danny told me that Alyssa has a cavity - Her first. So now we have to get her into the dentist ASAP since it hurts her almost every time she eats now. She has been complaining about food hurting her mouth for so long. It never even occurred to me that it could be a cavity.

First Day of Preschool

We finally signed Alyssa up for Preschool. She started this week and she was so excited to go. She goes two days a week in the afternoon. I think Ashley thought that she was going too.
Here she is showing off her new backpack. She claims that she doesn't like Dora that much anymore, but this was her choice of backpack.

Here she is in front of her preschool. It is at Grace Community Church located about 4 blocks from our house. We liked this preschool the best because it was close and it was one of the few church preschools in the area that doesn't include religion in their lessons. We also had heard a lot of good things from neighbors and friends about it. Her teachers names are Ms. Janeen and Ms. Shannon.

There are three different classrooms in the the preschool. Her classroom is the ladybug room.

On her first day, I snuck in the room and took a quick picture of her building a block tower.

So far she has loved going. Although, I think her favorite parts about preschool are the snack and playing on the playground. Hopefully she will come home more excited about the things that she is learning as she gets further into the year. I have noticed her taking books and trying to sound out the letters, so they must be teaching them letter sounds.