Nearly done with Aug09

Nother page done

I'm determined to finish this 2009 album.  I'm done through June now...

Sunrise

On Sunday morning of our camping trip, Cole woke me up quite early - 'Mom, I have to go pee'.  So I got up earlier than I had planned and brought him to the bathroom.  I realized it must be close to sunrise so I grabbed my camera when we got back to the tent and headed for the beach.  It was worth getting up early...

Camping at Bellows AFB

Last weekend we had a great camping trip.  Friends of ours sponsored us onto Bellows Air Force Base to their campground.  The campground is across the street from the beach, so the first night there the kids went out hunting for little crabs at the beach.  Cole caught one!

The campsites were nestled inbetween ironwood trees.  They are tall, skinny trees with really long, fine needles.  It was nice in there since it stayed reasonably shady and the tents didn't heat up as much.  

Here is the gorgeous beach that was right across the road from the campsites.  Isn't this beautiful!  The sands on the windward side where we were are very fine so it is almost silky when you walk on it.  We did see a few Portugese man-of-war jellyfish on the beach but nobody got stung all weekend.  

We spent Saturday morning playing at the beach.  The sand is great for digging and there were nice waves for bodyboarding.  It was very shallow pretty far out so it was great for the kids too.  

Here is Cole hanging with the girls from camp.  There were about a dozen kids altogether in the group of people we camped with, so the kids were rarely at a loss for what to do with themselves.  

The boys playing back at camp...

Bellows was great, nice campsites which were pretty quiet at night, hot showers (yay!), a minimart across the street (is it really camping when you can run across the street to get ice and beer?), and they also had a playground and mini golf just down the road too.  So hopefully we'll get a chance to camp there again sometime!

More scrapbooking

Getting a couple more pages done the past few days.  Still working on 2009 photos

One more

've finished scrapbooking through March 09.  If I can keep at it at this rate I may actually finish 2009 and get a book printed!

I'm on a roll

I've got a couple more pages done.  Yay!

Scrapbooking again

I've been trying very hard to go back and get a complete album done for 2009.  I'm done with January and half done with February after 2 days.  For most of the pages I'm just putting my favorites on in a 4x6 type fashion, and then I've set aside certain photos to scrapbook.  I plan to bind it all together in a book at one of the printing sites and hopefully move on to another year to finish (I can dream big anyways...).

Here are the layouts I've finished the past couple days

School Days

Aug 3 was Adam's first day of school.  In the last week before school started, he had only one request - go to Chuck-E-Cheese.  So we made a trip there and the kids plowed through a bunch of tokens and had a good old time.  

I also happened one day to pick up a couple of Star Wars coloring books and I didn't know how much money's worth I'd get out of those!  The boys adore anything to do with Star Wars right now, and they had some large size character faces to color in the books.  So we've been copying them onto cardstock and the kids make masks out of them.  We've got quite a collection already.  

Then Adam had his first day of school this week - a first grader!  This year he is going to Our Lady of Good Counsel catholic school.  He looks so adorable in his school uniform.  This should be a good but challenging year for him.  I think they step things up quite a lot in first grade compared to Kindergarten.  They also attend mass once a week there at the school, a friend of mine went to the school mass today and saw Adam there.  She said he was trying to do the songs and motions that go with it (I think they try to make the mass a little kid friendly).  Most of the kids went to school there before so they knew the routine, but she said he was trying his best.  Week one of school is almost over and they started in on homework on day 2, so I think we're going to be spending a lot more time on homework this year.  

Well more updates hopefully sooner than later this time!

July

Wow, yet another month gone by.  Of course there was no school in July so we spent a lot of time trying to stay busy with both kids home.  We did some Christmas in July crafts (complete with Christmas music) since I had picked up a Shrinky Dinks kit dirt cheap on clearance.  The kids really enjoyed that one.  They wanted to put up the real Christmas tree, but I drew the line there.  

I bought the kids a couple 'Dig a Dinosaur' kits with dinosaur bones embedded in plaster, and they're still working on that one.  It is a fun activity, I think Cole and I have spent the most time at that one.  

For MOMS Club, we headed to the firehouse.  It was a great tour, they took us through EVERYTHING.  That tour must have been over an hour long (with kids from infant to school age) and the kids had such a blast.  Then to top it off the firemen handed out coupon books with a bunch of food coupons including free Happy Meals, so we had lunch included with our tour.  Bonus!

The coupon books also had a coupon for the Dole Plantation Maze, so we headed up there to do the maze again.  I had done it with the boys a few months back and I think we found 5 of the 8 stations hidden in the maze. This time we found all 8.  I think it is easier the second time around :)