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

Levi’s quote for the day “I hae fireman balls coming out of my fingers”

Yeah, I think the translation would be “I have fireballs coming out of my fingers”

Funny stuff.

Football Sunday is a tradition at our house…the boys get their jerseys on and watch the Seahawks game. They love it! The picture of Levi and Carlos was so sweet, they had their arms around eachother and were showing the love, THEN it turned into a wrestling match. That’s usually how it happens around here.

This weekend was laid back AND very productive. I made 15 meals for the freezer for us to have at a later date, we brought up the bins of fall clothes for the boys and tried them all on and kept out what fit (BIG job) and the boys made muffins to take for snack at school tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s the big day for Carlos, first day of preschool. Hoping it’s not too traumatic and he gets on the bus and has a great time. Levi loves it, so hoping Carlos will be jazzed about it, too. We’ll take lots of pictures!

If you’ve kept up with the blog you will remember our last trip to the Grand Forest. It wasn’t good. We told Levi and Carlos that the next time they had to earn back our trust and so they were on leashes for the first half of the walk. They weren’t too happy about it. Carlos suggested that he hold his own leash, HA! You’ll see in the first picture that Trey was crying…he wanted a leash, too. He didn’t realize that he was being rewarded for not running away, he just wanted to be like his big brothers.

We had a nice lunch with Nana and Papa, and a great walk, too. The forest is so quiet and peaceful, even with our boys in it. It’ll be something we do again for sure.

The boys were exhaused from the night before (they didn’t get much sleep) and crashed at naptime. Dee did, too! I stayed up and worked on making some freezer meals. Got 9 done so I felt good about that. Anything I can do to get a little ahead for the week is good.

Got out the bins of fall/winter clothes and started the agonizing process of trying them on. Hate to say but I only got through 1 bin….more to try on tomorrow for sure. They hate it, we hate it but it has to be done.