So we got back in time this afternoon to get a couple loads of laundry done, let the boys play with their toys (they didn’t have any toys for 4 days!) and upload a ton of pictures….if you want to see them, check the previous post.

The boys favorite thing about our hotel room at the Shilo? A phone and television in the bathroom. They were amazed and each time they went in to use the potty, the tv would go on first. Forget the potty-tv, Dee and I liked the king sized bed and the extra pull out sofa. Lots of sleeping room for us all.

The conference was good, I’m totally excited about making lifebooks for foster kids. We had fun networking with foster parents from all over the state as well as social workers. We were also very lucky and won a pair of Seahawks tickets and cool sports and kitchen items baskets. Oh, and got Zoo Tycoon 2 and a bunch of expansion packs for our computer. We were lucky, lucky, lucky.

Ok, go look at the pictures!

Ok ladies (and gents),
As you know, I’m at a foster parent conference this week and I just took a class on “life books”. The ones we made were REALLY simple (a 99 cent little photo album with very simply scrapbooked pages that a foster parent can add photos to and send with the child).
In this, I had a revelation….maybe some of our friends/family are into scrapbooking and would want to make/donate some of these to local foster parents. I would be more than willing to get them to foster kids. In the community we are in, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are some kids out there with very few pictures of themselves and something like this could mean the world to a child.
Just thought I’d throw it out there, let me know if you are interested. I am planning on making some myself to send with our babies, as well as ones geared toward older kids to donate. If you wanna come hang out with me and do some, let’s do it! Like I said, they are super easy and only end up costing about $2 to make.

I don’t have pictures up yet since I forgot the cord to the camera, but I can tell you that we are having a ton of fun. Saturday we came down a day before our conference started so we could have some down time. My folks came, too and we the boys were crazy when they saw them. We had fun shopping at the Pirate Store (Nana spoiled them by buying them cool pirate hats) and eating Cotton Candy flavored ice cream and playing arcade games. Also we went in the pool and if you know my mom, you will know that she does NOT get her hair wet in the pool….never….and she did this time and did a handstand in the pool! You go girl. It was cool.

Went to a seminar on listening today and got some good ideas. Some were geared toward older kids and dealing with adults but I can always be a better listener. Also learned that body language is 93% of our communication, that’s a lot.

Got to the pool with the boys tonight and were hoping they would be worn out and crash, but Levi and Carlos are still awake at 9:30 but getting close to falling asleep. Trey’s always been our sleeper so getting him down isn’t so tough. Give him his “ma” (pacifier) and his blanket and he’s done. We were going to watch Ratatouille on the payperview here but it’s $11.95! For some reason I’m just not good with that.

Lots of pictures to share once we get home!

The kids were heinous today. Enough said.

It’s been a hectic day for sure. We started out on the road at 8:30am and headed to Tacoma to pick up an Ebay find…a GPS for our geocaching (more on that later). Got that, then headed back to Bremerton for lunch with our friend, Terry, who used to be the placement person for DSHS. She’s great and we really enjoyed sitting down for a meal together! Hoping we can do it again soon.

We stopped off at the Evil Empire (aka Walmart) to kill some time then headed off to Silverdale for speech. You would think that was a FULL day…but wait, there’s more. We came tried to hit the Gap on the way home (they had $0.97 shorts but I didn’t get any…read on) but Levi had a meltdown in the mall and we just put down the shorts and left. Mama wasn’t happy.

Anyhow, we headed home and stopped at Wilkes platground so the boys could run around alittle. They had lots of energy to burn off. We next went with our GPS to the Grand Forest and did some geocaching. Basically it’s treasure hunting (where the treasure is a container hidden by random people somewhere that contains a logbook and little trinkets that you swap out for other trinkets) and you can find out more at www.geocaching.com. It’s super cool. Or GPS seemed a tad off but Dee spotted it and our boys went nuts. It’s free fun for the family and certainly goes with the pirate theme our boys are into.

It’s been a long, long day and I’m ready for bed….school tomorrow and looking forward to the weekend when we go to Ocean Shores for the foster parent conference.

Translation “I crack myself up”

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2136670949517474464&pr=goog-sl