half a decade

HaPpY 5th Birthday Mason!

For his birthday, Mason had decided he wanted to celebrate turning 5 at Amazing Jake's (a huge indoor fun factory with games, rides, go-carts, food, etc). He also decided it was time for another Spiderman theme - not only for decorations but also for the majority of his gift requests. Ask and you shall receive! He got Spiderman (and friends) action figures, sunglasses, a hat, sticker book, coloring pages, etc. Spence made sure to throw in some Ninja Turtle gear and he did get a pretty awesome race track too.

At the end of the day as we were preparing to get ready for 'school' the next day Mason asked if he would be going to his 'regular school'. I said yes and he said with a sad tone, 'I didn't know I was going to regular school tomorrow, I thought because I was 5 I was going to start kindergarten tomorrow'. I guess I still do have some of my 'little' boy afterall :)

let's party!

the 'cheetah' ride

games, games, games

 

five!

ahhh, presents!

last day of four

It's amazing to think how fast 5 years can go by. Tomorrow we are going to hit yet another milestone as Mason turns 5. Tonight he said to me "Mommy, I'm so happy I could cry." When I asked him why he said "because I am so excited about turning 5 tomorrow." I am excited too, with a little tinge of sadness that he won't be my 'little' boy anymore. Four has been a great year Mase - looking forward to kicking off year 5 with a fun celebration!

san diego

Over Memorial Day our little family of four went on a family vacation to fabulous San Diego. We decided to make the drive since it's not too far from Phoenix. 20 minutes into the trip, as he is watching a movie on the dvd player, Mason asks if it's going to be much longer. Seriously! Too funny. Actually, the boys were great little road trippers and sat tight for the 6 hr drive.

While we were there, we went to Sea World, took the boys on their first visit to the ocean and had more family fun than we thought we could pack into a quick get away. Sea World had many amazing shows and interactive exhibits. We loved watching the dolphin and killer whale shows and eating all kinds of park food - waffle cones, cotton candy, you name it.

Spence was super thrilled to see the penguin exhibits and Mase was eager to see the Beluga whales. Who knew they also had awesome rides?! They had a special kids area that had mini-thriller rides, tea cups and the like. We also opted to go on some wet rides - and when I say wet, we were drenched! One ride was us in a big tube riding down the rapids. We were soaked after this, head to toe and decided we should head to the Journey to Atlantis roller coaster (pic below - in which you also get SUPER wet). Soooo fun!

The weather was a little on the cool side the day we spent at the ocean, but we were so happy to be there it didn't matter. As we were walking to the ocean Spencer had said 'Mom, I think the ocean is going to be beautiful.' Man was he right.  We spent time in the water, made sandcastles and searched for sea shells. We had so much fun I can't wait to plan our next getaway!

  Mase was a little freaked out by Shamu at the start of our adventure

 This 'Skytower' ride gave us an awesome view

Spence

Before the dolphin show

Journey to Atlantis - our brave little boys rode this!

Shipwreck Rapids (not a photo of us of course, because neither

our camera or phones would not have survived this trip)

Brothers 

 Amazing photo: courtesy of Micah

My 3 guys at the ocean 

 Me and my boys 

 Spence getting ready to 'ride the wave'

                                 Making sandcastles      .....       with brother's help

                             

 Baywatch! 

 Souvenir's: 'Pizza' the killer whale and 'T-Y' the penguin

good times

                        ready to head home                              

                                                

                                                                                           

you might want to sit down for this

It feels weird to skip an entire year on the blog and just jump into posting about last week. Those of you that are closest to us have been 'in the loop' so to speak, minus the photos. And since I, myself, like to look back on all of the old posts, I'm going to do a big fat update while trying to keep it short and sweet. But like I said, it's been a year, so you might want to sit down for this. In a nutshell:

***
Spencer:
Spencer turned 6 last Fall and had an awesome Pirate themed birthday party. We went to a fun indoor kids place called Amazing Jake's and had a blast.

He also started kindergarten! Wow, time flies. I know I've said that before, but really, where do the years go? Spencer attended full day kindergarten, five days a week. He learned to count past 100, do some crazy complex math problems and READ and write sentences with punctuation. Kindergarten sure has changed since 'our days'. At the end of the year he had to pick a sea creature (he chose the Red King Crab), create a poster board with facts and pictures and present it to the class. He was even graded with a rubric scoring sheet by the teacher. Whaaaaat?! All in all he had a great year with Mrs. Rosenfield and sure did grow a lot. He even lost his first tooth!

First Day of School: Aug 2012

Last day of School: May 2013

***
Mason:
Mason attended his last year of preschool. He moved from his favorite classroom with Ms. Pat to Ms. Janis - both awesome teachers. He finally started  to break out of his shell a little more and really soaked in a lot of info in his 2 days a week! The rest of the weekdays he was home with Micah - and he was happy as a clam about that. In May we celebrated his graduation and he will be ready to start kindergarten at the end of the summer. He's ready for it!

First day of School: Aug 2012

Graduation: May  2013

***

Other high points from the year: 

Halloween: This year we had a pirate and a knight. It was another year with more candy than any one person could eat. Great trick-or-treating though!

***
Christmas: We had my mom and Zach here for the traditional St. Nick's party. We decorated houses, ate lots of cookies and enjoyed having our family here.

Being cool like Zach

Decorating with the one who started it all - Grandma :)

Then we rolled into what we always be known as 'the year of the 2 Christmas Trees'. I could write 2 pages about this alone, but I'll spare you. Long story short, we always get a live tree. This year was no exception. 2 days before Christmas we come home to a rotten smelling tree with no signs of what could have happened. I did my usual go to behavior and Googled it. I freaked myself out by reading horror stories about impaled rodents stuck in tree branches.  Mind you, the tree was FULLY decorated. So it was either death by said bad smelling tree or swap it out for another 2 days before the holiday. We chose the latter. (We actually had a third option, which was to 'have Christmas' by our smallish, artificial/fake tree in the family room. But that didn't really seem like an option). So while Micah went on a search for a new live tree, I pulled all of the decorations and lights off the bad one. Then we ditched the old one, put up the new and redecorated the entire thing. It. Was. Nightmarish. But worth it!

Moving on - Christmas was amazing. We did our usual baking, had a nice dinner and celebrated with many great gifts. The only thing missing, as usual, was our extended family :(

The 'fake tree' that was too wimpy to celebrate  
Christmas with, but didn't give us any grief either

Our 2nd live tree during the 'year of the 2 Christmas trees'

***
P!nk - I have an awesome husband that planned a fabulous surprise for me: he bought me P!nk tickets and coordinated a behind the scenes surprise to have my BFF fly down here for the concert. I hadn't seen her in two years.

Me & Beth

***
St. Patrick's Day: In line with our traditions we had a fun party- complete with Irish music, green everything and celebrated the night away.

PARTY! 

That pretty much brings us up to current. Now I can begin posting about more recent happenings. Let's see if  I can keep up!

it's been long enough

I can't believe it's already been almost a year since our last post!
The blog is officially under construction: new laptop in use = updates to come.
I realize at this point I am blogging pretty much just for me (and a grandparent or two out there)....but it certainly is nice to look back at the little snippets of the boys and our adventures over the last few years. Especially seeing the photos :)

More to come....soon!