Jen and Her Little Women

This is the first of 10 posts on Jen and the girls' trip to CA over Spring break 2011. There is one more to be added about the bike trips as soon as I get the photos from Grampa!

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Here they are roaring up the driveway!
They made it safe and sound!
(Yes they have the same
car we do, so do Missy and Chris!
An odd coincidence!)

The girls arrived last night right at dinner time. It was perfectly timed, we had made a big batch of spaghetti and everyone was hungry except sweet, Pipey who was having a touch of the flu. Honestly, no matter what, there is always the unexpected to keep life interesting. Fortunately tonight she is feeling pretty good, so it was short-lived. Apparently Hazie and Chloe had it earlier in the week. Fingers crossed no one else gets it.

Hazie loved sitting in Aunt Laura's high chair.
She also like the bumble bee plates!

After dinner the little girls initiated the use of our new bathtub. They were the first people to actually bathe in it. Neither Jim or I like baths much so we always have used the shower. But the girls made the soaking tub look pretty fun.

It became a family event,
even Molly was in there at one point.

Julia's sparkle toes

This morning we all awakened feeling refreshed and it is a good thing as it has been a long day.

We had a conflict for church today. My beloved teacher's memorial was at 1:00 as is our church time, so we got to go to a different ward this morning. It landed up being just Grampa and me and the Julia and Chloe.

Jen and Hazie stayed home with Piper.
Bring on the artwork!

Just home from church.

Piper feeling better after a shower and a bath.

Chloe Jane prefers being called Jo Jo right now.
I think that is sweet since it was my mom's nickname.

Had a few minutes for a walk this morning
before Jim and I had to leave
for Berkeley for the memorial.

"Jo Jo" brought her bike on the walk!

The memorial was just so inspiring and so tender. Many people ( a lot of faculty and some students from many of his 35 years of teaching at CVHS)) came from my high school days and it was really neat to see how all the teachers had changed. (Of course we students hadn't changed a bit!)

We had a nice reunion with Judi and Joel and my French teacher. She is amazing and must be in her late 70s or early 80s. We had a lovely meal with Judi and Joel and then came home. It was a wonderful nostalgic experience. Charlie Lynch receive a remarkable tribute from many people and was loved by us all. How wonderful would it be to be an influence in so many lives for good. A worthy aspriation of us all, hopefully.

While we were gone the girls just chilled and played in the yard and walked to the park. I got a text from Jen with a photo of Chloe, I mean "Jo Jo" swimming in our pond. I think she is the first kid to swim in it, but Jim seems to remember Christopher doing it. It must have been freezing! But Jo Jo is a Pioneer woman like her mom!

Well, that is it for the first full day of their visit.
It is just great to have them all here!
We hated to leave them for the memorial but
it all worked out and it was good that we went.

It was one of those days when life just felt so rich.

Spring Break~Girls' Day!

I have already posted several of the fun things we did when the girls came to visit for 8 days over their spring break. I still have a few more posts to do. I love that by going to the edit page and selecting options on the bottom you and change the date and put them in correct order when the entire week long event is finished. I just somehow ran out of time before the whole vacation was finished but eventually it will all run in a sequence on the blog. Magic! I also did the same thing on a few days of our New England vacation but I may never get to those. It is really hard to go back but having an accurate and complete record is the motivator.

The first full weekday they were here Jim designated as "Girls' Day!" He wanted to go to work at the Temple so he micro managed "highly suggested" this should be our craft, baking and shopping day! Isn't he clever in having us do the things he wanted to pass on, while he was gone? Of course we had to schedule out each day so we could fit everything in and keep the girls from getting bored.

These look a lot better and
smoother when they are done.

So we did crafts first thing on Monday morning. We made the tissue eggs and that was a lot of fun and took a few hours. Jen brought all the crafty stuff then Grampa boiled the eggs the night before and had them all ready to work on. He wanted to be sure his agenda items happened while he was away! By the end of the day he had over booked us and we were exhausted! Haha!

Back to the eggs...No cracks in the hard boiled egg is the key to making them last a long time. I have some I made many years ago. The yoke and white dry up something like the inside of a gourd.

Jen also brought fun things for the little girls to work on that were not as time consuming. This is the foam egg Hazie decorated with foam stickers. Chloe made one too but Hazie is the one I can always find sitting quietly when it is time to take a picture. Chloe is a moving target! LOL! It is funny how little kids run everywhere they go until one day they don't. Chloe can still be heard running around the house from room to room. I find that so interesting that one day they just stop doing that. She will be six in May but she still does it.

These eggs you are seeing above and this Mr. and Mrs. egg are in process. Since you are putting something flat on a curved surface you have to finesse the paper with gluing and drying and pressing it down and gluing some more. The girls did some and Jen and I did too. They were pretty cute when all finished. We meant to spray glitter them but ran out of time and energy by the end of the week.

The big girls made Easter cupcakes and cleaned up their mess! Yay! Jen and I finished up the egg and craft projects and cleaned up that mess! We were busy little beavers that morning.

This is what Hazie did!

Doing the decorating later in the afternoon!

So cute! Dessert for dinner!

Well maybe the big sisters let
Hazie try one before dinner!

We were expecting Great Grandma Gloria over for a taco dinner and a bonfire to roast marshmallows and tell ghost stories outside. It was a plan devised by Grampa and Piper.

In the afternoon we went to Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton and looked around, did girl things and saw their Easter displays.

We took these photos because the store front window
was so pretty as a background.

Some of the mall displays.

So Sweet!

The girls had a little bit of money to spend and this Beauty Mask is what Chloe bought with hers. Love the hair's new arrangement! She wore it all day long! She had this one front tooth on the top hanging by a thread all week. Look what happened on their way home!

After dinner we went outside for the bonfire. Somehow I missed getting any pictures of Grandma Gloria with the kids. I think it was because she wasn't feeling too well at all and didn't stay too long after dinner.

Toasty warm and ready for the spooky stories.
I thought those were for Halloween but what do I know?
I found it interesting that one of the spooky stores involved
someone receiving scary texting on their cell phone.
Times have changed, huh?

What happened to the one where the girl's
head fell off and rolled down the stairs
when she took off her neck scarf?
Remember that one?

The yummy part!

We had a fun night outside. The spookiest thing was the frogs that serenaded us with such loud croaking it was overwhelming you could barely talk over them. And several times I tried to record it and they would immediately stop croaking when I would start. There were so many and they were so loud and we have never seen a frog in this yard. Where they were hiding is a mystery all together because they sounded like they were right beside us. I felt like all their eyes were on me when I would silently touch my camera to record! Spooky for sure.

This was the best I could catch on video!

Cacophony of Frogs and Humans...

The Woods, Sea Cliffs and a "Beary" Good Time