spring break part 2

Tuesday was intended to be more of a relaxed day between two busy days.  We woke up when we woke up, which was early again thanks to jetlag, and had breakfast at the hotel. We drove up into the western coastal Santa Ana Mountains and spent the remainder of the morning at Casper Wilderness Park.  We were notified at the park entrance that there had been a few recent mountain lion sightings!  I was a bit skittish about going on the trails, so we explored just enough to check out some cactus and get a good view of the mountians, then spent some time at the playground.

 

 

For lunch, we went to Fisherman's Restaurant on The Pier at San Clemente.  The fish and chips were good but the view was phenomenal.

 

After lunch, we walked down the pier and watched the surfers.

 

Then it was time to get a closer look at the ocean!

 

 



 

There was a high surf advisory, so we went back to the hotel to swim.  After dinner at the hotel and ice cream on the harbor, we called it a night.  Wednesday was going to be a big day!



spring break part 1

Looks like I need to take some pictures of the made-over master bedroom.  I did get it done the day before I added another school to my work week.  I'm now working four days a week at three schools, but I took the extra school as a special project to earn a little extra cash to go on a spring break trip.  Our destination was California.  Bryan travels there for work once or twice a month, so we made it a leisure/business trip. 

 

If you don't count Reggie's flight at 3 weeks old, this was the kids' first airplane ride.  They were so excited, and it was a lot of fun for them.  We arrived late Sunday night.  Pacific Time Zone meant we were up and ready to go around 4:30am Monday morning.

 It was a nice surprise to have a foggy view of the ocean from our hotel room's balcony.

 The kids were less impressed with the view and ready to get to Legoland!

 

 

We should have predicted that Emmet would open up the park to the tune of "Everything is Awesome".

 

 

We took a little cruise and saw both the Eiffel Tower and Mt Rushmore in less than 10 minutes.

 

 

 

We watched the Lego Friends Show and then got to meet them "in real life"!

 Brett is really excited about the Lego Ninjago Ride coming in May.  (We won't be there.)

 

I tried to get a date with this guy, but he was disinterested.

 

 

 

We built race cars and raced them.  Brett's won!

 





 

 

We met a few more friends from The Lego Movie and watched The Lego Movie A New Adventure in 4D.  If you are wondering what the forth dimension is, it is wind and rain!

 

Legoland was a really fun park perfect for kids 6-8 years.  We did do some waiting in line, but the crowd was manageable. The park was open 9-7, we were there the full time, and did not get through the whole park.  After, we went out for pizza at a place Bryan's coworker recommended and checked in to a different hotel in San Juan Capistrano. 

 

to be continued...

master bedroom makeover

As I mentioned in the previous post, we are getting our ceilings retextured.  When we updated our kitchen, the ceilings had to be redone due to the electrical work, so we elected to have the popcorn scraped and have the ceilings retextured.  Now we are starting the process of having the rest of our house done.  The next few weeks are going to be chaotic with moving furniture around and not having access to large sections of our house! 

We are starting with the master bedroom/bath because I want to paint the walls.  Before we moved into this house, we intended to paint the three upper bedrooms.  We got the kids' bedrooms done and ran out of patience before we got to the master.  Actually, Reggie ran out of patience.  We were going back and forth between the old house and new house with our 1, 2, and 3 year olds, and they didn't understand what was going on.  A couple weeks into the process, we pulled into our old garage, and with large crocodile tears, Reggie cried "I want big big house! I want big big house!"  So, we moved our beds in, and the master bedroom is the only room in the house that we have never painted!

Here are a few -almost-before pictures.  Bryan was already taking stuff down before I took pictures!

 

Cleaning everything out of our bedroom moved me closer to my goal:

 

20 - Bryan cleaned out his closet

5- single socks and a slipper of Lydia's

2- a messenger bag and duffle bag to good will.

16- I had a box of toys "to get rid of" in the corner of our room.

7 - magazines to donate to a project I'm doing with some kids at school.

16 - items I threw away when I cleaned the cabinet in the master bedroom.



Here is our temporary bedroom!

I also cleaned out Lydia's clothes to pass on to a friend.  Oh my goodness, she had enough socks to go at least a month without doing laundry, and I wash clothes twice a week!  We kept 10 pair.  Getting rid of 59 clothing items.

We're getting rid of 109 more items, bringing my total to 567! Yes!

2000 things in 2016

Part of my job is teaching guidance lessons in the middle school once a month.  In January, I taught a lesson about setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) and we talked about the importance of writing goals down and also sharing goals with other people to help us be accountable.

I should probably take my own advice, so here is my goal:

I will get rid of (sell, donate, recycle, throw away, use up) 2000 things in 2016.

My rules are (1) Consumable items don't count unless it is something I don't intend to replace (2) A 24 piece puzzle counts as one item, etc. (3) I'm not going to count papers that constantly get recycled, such as kids' school papers, newspapers and junk mail.

Is this realistic?  I don't know, but I think I'm off to a pretty good start. 

Since January 1st -

20 broken toys and mostly used coloring books
70 children's book (I know this seems like a lot, but our babysitter works at a library and is always giving us books that have been removed from the library inventory) - sold at Half Price Books
12 DVD's - Sold at Half Price Books
10 children's books - thrown away
10 empty boxes I held onto for Christmas and didn't use - recycle.

This week we had the unfortunately circumstance that the outside pipe from our sump pump froze up and as a result it was spraying water into our laundry room.  The silver lining was cleaning out the laundry room has been on my to-do list for a long time!

I threw away 40 items.

This weekend I am getting ready for our master bedroom ceilings to be professionally painted.  A good push to clean out our closets!

70 clothing items to thrift store
60 items trash/recycle
I found a bag of 14 left over cloth diapering items and gave away using craigslist.
I found a bag of 20 left over loot bag items from a kids' birthday, I will donate to my treat boxes at my schools!

I am also going to be seeing the friend Reggie's hand-me-downs go to next weekend, so I went through his clothes and set aside a bag of 40 items for her boys.

I posted many things for sale on craigslist, but will not count them until they actually leave my house.

Total so far: 458 items!  WOW! 2000 items seems like a huge number, but I'm already 23% there!