Home Sweet Home

Spring Break Cruise! I know all these blog posts are documenting older news, but since my blog is our family journal, I can't forget to blog about the cruise Justin and I took with my family during spring break. It was a shorter 4-day cruise from Long Beach and it hit Catalina Island and Ensenada, Mexico. Cruising for me is really all about the company. Mexico is Mexico, no matter which stop you make. It's all the same cheap trinkets and other crapola that I'm not going to buy (save a token cheap trinket for the kids). Catalina Island is a total bore if the weather isn't good and you aren't there to hit the beach (which we weren't because it was cold anyway). The funnest part is just spending time with my parents and siblings. Going places together, eating a two hour dinner together at night and the occasional lunch or breakfast together during the day, playing cards, hitting the late night buffets or shows, Karaoke (though nobody wanted to do it this time), et...

One Year Ago today.... We had just gotten home from Georgia (the kids and I that is). Only a few days prior we were doing this: and a lot of this  We saw so many history sites and it was so fun! (and I'm not even a history buff...)  We went on bike rides around the island (to the grocery store, to Chik-Fil-A for  peppermint milk shakes, or just for kicks) probably twice a week... I have a hard time saying goodbye to good things in my life. Georgia was definitely one of them. Even now as I post this I can't help but go browse real estate listings on St. Simons Island and dream of going back. Living there really made me evaluate how important it was for me to live in AZ (I always thought it was very important to me) but now I'm not so sure. The quality of life for my kids was easily 10x better there, but part of that is the location we chose for our home here in AZ. There aren't any kids on our street for my kids to play with, no schools within walking distance, ...

Brighton's Birthday I cannot believe Brighton is 7 already! He's not supposed to get this old! I know Justin already posted a note to him on his birthday, but now that I've finally sat down to blog (I've had ZERO desire to blog for the past few weeks) I'm going to post pictures of his "celebration". I put it in quotations because we didn't do much of a celebration this year. I decided a couple years ago that I liked the idea of doing a big birthday party every other year and just do smaller family parties on the off years. We had a big party for Brighton's 6th birthday last year in Georgia, so it wasn't in the cards for this year. When I asked Brighton what he wanted to do for his birthday, he said he wanted to go to the Phoenix Children's Museum. We got a gift card to go there from Grandma Jo for Christmas, so it sounded like a pretty affordable option to me :) I let Brighton invite four friends, hoping that we'd get maybe 2-3 to come...

Luke Days Dave & Jenny VanAllen invited us out to the West side to go to the annual Luke Days celebration at Luke Airforce Base. We hadn't ever trekked over to their side of town so we figured it was probably time. They live so close to the airforce base that we were able to park at the edge of their neighborhood and walk to the base.   We started out by waiting in a line about a mile long for at least an hour before we could enter the base. Yuck! It was a sunny and hot day, but the kids enjoyed themselves and were able to tour some cargo planes and see some cool flight acrobatics.