Crazy Fun Day

Last week we had a fun marathon day. It worked out that our preschool field trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and our friends Dyan and Chris were at Disneyland for one last day. I gathered all my courage and tried to figure out the best way to maneuver ourselves for one day of insanity. I figured it was so crazy it just might work.... Either that, or it could go terribly wrong!

We left the house, well stocked, and headed down to the aquarium.

There was a huge crowd of us, but the kids loved playing with all their friends and running around like lunatics.
We really have the movie "Finding Nemo" to thank for the interest the children took in the marine animals. We spent most of our time looking for Dori, Nemo (Kiki's fave), Crush, Mr. Ray (Ryker's fave), etc.

Ethan and Nicholas buddied up for some fun, and loved being silly.

After a decent amount of time there we headed back to the car, and ate lunch on our laps on our way to Disneyland. Ryker fell asleep en route, what a relief, and Nicholas was having a good day. We parked at downtown Disney (3 free hrs!) and rushed in to meet our pals.

Nicholas and Logan picked up right where they left off, as seemless as could be, and began some little game. I loved catching up and remembering how much I missed Dyan!

The poor Perez-Youngs were tired out from their trip and headed out after one last ride, Winnie the Pooh. On our way walking them out the boys just joined hands and got a conversation going. Most adorable thing ever :)
Naturally, being at disneyland, we had to hit a few more favorites before we headed out. As we got off Pirates I realized we had 15 minutes until our parking expiration and we bolted out. I made it one minute short but the man was nice and let us go free. (Those who know disneyland know that Pirates to downtown Disney parking lot in 15 min is no small feat!!)

At the end of the day we were totally exhausted, sweaty, smelly, and done with having fun.

The Perfect Family

From the moment you get married the question everyone inevitably asks is how many kids we want to have. I have such a hard time with this question. Is it so bad that I can't commit to any one number?

Some days I think I would love to have a big family (to me that means 6-7 kids) where we can all just be close to one another and have fun spending time with only us. My kids aren't going to have a lot of cousins, or at least many around their ages, so its pretty much just us all the time anyway. I would love to have us all be best friends and play games together all the time.

Then I have rough days, and I think 3 would be good! I can't even envision having the third at this point, but I know I will eventually. But what if 3 is another boy? Could I settle with 3 boys? Also, being young, would I be done before I'm 30 with having kids? The greatest appeal to having 3 is retaining my sanity. I don't know how to have a quality, deep relationship with so many kids at once. Do moms of 6-7 or even more kids really know what is going on in their children's lives? Don't the kids just run around unsupervised most of the time?

It would seem the happy medium for me is about 4-5, but naturally I have a hard time nailing it down. I come from a family of 4 and it always seemed small considering our large age gaps. We spent so much time with just our family when we moved that it made me wish I had more siblings often. I used to dream of two more kids between me and my sister, 7 years younger. 5 is probably my best guess, but who knows. At this point I feel very blessed to have these two guys around, and I'm not really anxious to add many more right away. Hopefully someday I can figure out my "magic number", but in the mean time I think we'll just focus on a case-by-case basis.

Kiki-isms

Kiki (or Keke, as he spells it) had another fun weekend with his grandparents in town, the primary program, and an awesome birthday party. He loves to be a busy kid with lots of fun activities and he took it all in stride. Lounging around sunday morning he decided to join in the adults domino's game like he was one of the pack. After a few minutes of sitting with us, playing along in his own way and hearing us banter back and forth with each other, he said quietly to himself, "You love it... you know you do." Needless to say, we were all cracking up, and thought it was so adorable.

One of our other recent favorite quotes was from last week. Ryker and Nicholas were doing a puzzle together, and trying to play nicely. Nicholas was very concerned that Ryker was putting the pieces in wrong, and finally had enough when he did it again. He looked right at him and said, "Rykie, I'm so disgusted!" (meaing "disappointed"). Of course Ryker just stared blank-faced back :)

The other evening after a long crazy day I let the kids watch our new movie, Tangled. At the end when Rapunzel is fighting with her mom and Flynn cuts off all her hair, the evil mom goes tumbling out the tower window. Nicholas, watching intently as she fell, says, "this isn't going to end well..."

Two Little Monkeys

Over here we encourage jumping on the bed