A Good Day at Butchart Gardens

Wednesday we ventured out to the famous Butchart Gardens. The weather was just right for the day. The boys did surprisingly well there. I thought they might get bored with 55 acres of flowers & plants. They actually posed for me whenever I asked!




A couple passing by was nice enough to offer to take our picture. Usually it's hard to tell that we were all together on our excursions.


More photos of the boys...





Playing around with one of those mirrored garden balls...


It was a good day.




A little side note:
Linda went in this morning (Thursday, 6/19) to have her baby girl. I wanted to wish her a great delivery and I can't wait to meet the new little one! I'll see you both in a couple days.

Greetings from Victoria B.C.

Hello from beautiful Victoria B.C.! We took the ferry from Port Angeles on Sunday afternoon. It was a very pretty day, so we had great views as we crossed over to Canada.



The ferry ride was about 1 1/2 hours long so we had some time to goof around with the camera. Of course we rarely get all 4 of us in a photo at the same time, so we do the typical arm outstretched to get myself and the boys in a photo. I let Mateo & Jaxon take a few photos as well. As you can see Chico was a little too "busy" to help.






Cindy & Tom (and MacKenzie & Flynn) happend to be up here visiting some of Tom's relatives so they joined in some activities for a couple days. We took the kids to Victoria's Bug Zoo. That was pretty fun for the kids (well, for the grownups, too). Most of us took the oportunity to hold a bug or two.







After Bug World we went back to the condo and the kids played while Cindy rocked out to Guitar Hero III on the Wii. I think she's hooked now!


Today we went and checked out the Royal Brittish Museum. We watched an IMAX movie and then spent a couple more hours looking at the exhibits. I tried to do a couple of photo ops after the museum, and they went fairly well considering the kids were itching to let off some energy.



Cindy and family have to leave tomorrow morning so we'll be on our own to explore Victoria a little more. We're here until Saturday, so you'll have to check back to see what else we were able to do while here.

What are you lookin' at?

Look at these lovely haircuts! Yikes!! Their new favorite place to get their haircut is a little shop over by the big Hillsboro Costco. I think it's called "Barbers". It's only for men/boys. Mateo & Jaxon get excited because they get to have a soda and watch tv while they're getting haircuts. The ladies in there also give them a little neck massage - sounds pretty nice! The last couple of times they've come home with some colored hair gel and they think they're pretty cool with it. The first time they had it done Mateo asked if he could wear it to school the next day and I said I guessed so. He must have laid in his bed like a board and not moved that night because it looked exactly the same the next morning (no bed-head at all)! Too funny! They cut Mateo's bangs shorter than normal this time, so his gel wasn't as obvious as Jaxon's!

Oh, I was just informed by someone reading over my shoulder that he doesn't think this hair gel makes him cool because in 2nd grade vocabulary C-O-O-L means "Constipated, Overweight, Out of Style, Looser". I can't believe they already say stuff like this in 2nd grade. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I didn't think that started until 5th or 6th grade. I'm old!





I bet you didn't know Chico was in a Mariachi band did you? The Dillavous had a Mexican Fiesta last Friday night and when I arrived I was surprised to see Chico standing in the corner belting out some traditional Spanish tunes. I didn't get any other photos because my camera battery was dying, but everything looked great! Unlike their normal "game night" parties, this one included every one's kids, so they had a pinata for the kiddies to break open. She also had a great taco/burrito bar with wonderful meats and all the fix-ins and everyone in attendance brought a little something to eat that fit the theme. Muchas gracias Alicia & Gaylon!!





Today was Mateo's last day of 2nd grade - whoo hoo!! I stayed up way too late last night making these little gifts for his teacher, some of the staff aids and his favorite school librarian. I totally copied this idea from Linda. She covered some of these jumbo Hershey's candy bars (mmmm, chocolate...) for Malia's preschool teachers and they turned out so cute that I just had to do it also. I pretty much copied her exact layout, just used different papers and some different accessories. I had this whole other plan for a gift for Mateo's teacher, but being the procrastinator that I am, I didn't have time to do it. Now it may be a gift for one of their teachers next year.

Well, we're leaving Sunday for Victoria BC, so I may not be able to post next week. I'm going to take my laptop with me, so if I'm able to I will update with some photos of beautiful British Columbia. Until then, enjoy the beginning of summer!!

A fun card

Last Friday our CTMH unit had a surprise baby shower for Linda. She's due with her 3rd baby on 6/13 and it'll be her 2nd girl. I'm very excited for her and her family!

We all thought it would be fun to do a little something for her. You don't always get to have a shower for your 2nd or 3rd child and it's fun to get at least a few new things! I think Linda was pretty surprised and everyone got such cute little gifts for her and the baby!

Since I was Project Leader for this month's meeting I tried to keep within the theme of the night. I made a Baby Girl Criss Cross Card with some Random Stamping. We usually try to do something that the others in the group aren't very familiar with. I had made some criss-cross cards for my swap back in April, but the other's hadn't tried one yet. Also, I had never tried Random Stamping - which is basically making up your own paper using stamps and inks.

I think it turned out pretty cute and thought I'd share it.

Here's my Random Stamped paper. It was fun chosing my own design and color palette.

Yee haw!

New York's got it's "Naked Cowboy" and it seems as though Forest Grove has it's own "Semi-Naked Cowboy". Look at those poses! Yee haw!!!!

Ahhh, Spring cleaning....

Well, it seems as though Spring has arrived. I've always wondered about this "sping cleaning" idea. Now, I'm not one that likes to clean AT ALL, but why such a big emphasis on doing it in the Spring? Well, now that the weather has decided to become more mild and a bit sunnier than it has been in awhile, I actually do have this urge to clean things up. We moved into this house in the month of April (5 years ago), so I think this time of year reminds me of when everything was brand new and everthing had a place. It could also be that I'm tired of entering every room in my house and feeling overwhelmed by the amount of clutter. It makes me want to run the other way!

Since we aren't going anywhere this weekend we decided this would be a good time to start our cleaning spree. We decided to begin with our biggest problem child - the one unfinished room in our house. When we moved into this house in 2003 only the main floor was finished. This house has a daylight basement the same size as the main floor and we had the builder go ahead and sheetrock the basement, but there was no flooring, doors, moldings, etc. Within a few months we painted most of the rooms and put in carpet. I think it was another year or so before we got moldings and doors down there. Now it's almost complete except for one large room.

When we moved in back in 2003 Mateo was 3 and Jaxon was about a month old. We've been telling the boys from that very first day that this pretty large room downstairs would be there "play room". To this day it's still called the "play room", but there has never been any playing done in this room at all!

I should have taken a before photo of the room yesterday before we started. Imagine a 400 square foot room with white primered walls and no flooring (just a subfloor) packed with boxes and toys and just and overwhelming amount of "stuff". The clutter touched all walls and piles averaged about 5 feet in height. Crazy for anyone to have this much stuff and this is just one room in our house - yikes! (No, the other rooms aren't that bad, but they're bad enough.)

I'll take a photo of the room today, but mind you we removed about half the room yesterday (all toys) and moved that into the family room to sort into piles - throw away, Good Will, ebay/craigslist, keep, etc... I did take a photo of the family room and you'll probably gasp in horror when you see the amount of toys we had all hidden away in the "play room" not being played with at all. At one time we removed all buy a few toys from the boys for a punishment (Mateo was going through a naughty streak) and they never came out again. That part wasn't planned. We really did intend to bring at least some of the toys back, but believe me, they've accumulated more, so NO they are not deprived!

We've always tried to tell people that we have enough toys to open a toy store and now maybe they'll believe us. I'll post photos a bit later today, you may want to make sure you're sitting down when you check back :)

Part Deux:

OK, so I didn't get to posting photos on Saturday. I did take the photos right after I wrote the first part of this post, so here goes...

The "play room" after removing about half the stuff... you couldn't even get down this little hallway without climbing over stuff.






















Where Chico is standing was the worse spot. The "before" photo of this spot would have filled the whole frame and boxes were stacked just shy of touching the ceiling. I didn't think we'd removed anything but toys out of here at this point, but he had.


Now I'm standing where Chico just was.


OK, here's the shot of the basement from the bottom of the stairs looking into what would become my "weekend of fun". It took me all weekend to sort, find missing pieces and decide what to do with everything.








Doesn't Chico look excited? While I took over the toy part of the weekend, he focused on going through a ton of boxes of paper that was in the "play room". So now you can imagine what our living room looks like! I'm not going to show that right now, downstairs is embarassing enough. Thanks for all your hard work this weekend Chico!






















Here's the "after the weekend" shot of the family room. We had pushed back all the furniture to make a work area. Hopefully tonight I'll get the last remaining things out of here and move the furniture back into position. We've got some Wii playing that needs to get done!!

Indiana Gallegos

There's Indiana Jones pandemonium in the Gallegos residence today!! The new Indiana Jones movie starts tonight and the boys are soooo thrilled! They are supposed to go see it with Granny this weekend. Mateo came home sick from school today, so hopefully he'll recover and be able to go.

They've been excited about this movie for months! We now have all the old movies, Legos galore (not enough according to the boys) and they really want the Indiana Jones game for the Wii.

They've also started acting out the movies. Mateo let me capture a few photos of him in his Indy garb. I thought he did a great job of coming up with this outfit from clothes found in his closet. He just needs a whip and the look would be complete! (Yeah, there will be no whips in this house with these two boys!!)

Alright Mateo, I mean Indy, go find us some lost treasure!!