Expressions

Rosie is at such a fun age right now!! She's learning and learning and learning! Right now she IS the term "soaking it up like a sponge". I love to teach her new things and watch her mind think as she learns!! Yesterday we worked on expressions on our face! It's so important to me that Alana be able to commuincate and tell me and show me how she is feeling and yesterday as we sat in the car and waited, I would say an expression and she would show me a face that went with it. I thought this was a good idea to play with her to get her thinking. She's so much fun to play around with!

Think, think, think....


Surprised!!


sIlLy! :p

So sad

Happy!!

And my favorite so far.... ANGRY!

Poor girl has the biggest five-head ever when her bangs are pulled back!

Hold please

For a looooooooong 8 months it’s felt like my life was on hold! Wait to buy this, wait to plan that. Patience and I are not very good friends, never have been and never will be. But I’ve learned so much over the last 8 months. One minute I’m on a high driving to Laughlin and can’t wait to have some fun and the next minute I’m on the phone with a devastated husband telling me he just lost his job.
While him losing his job was the biggest relief off of both of our shoulders it also was a huge hit to us. Bittersweet.

What a whirlwind the last 8 months have been. Before Victor lost his job we would always complain about how everyone blames every little thing on the "economy". Boy were we hit hard by that same little word that we had rolled our eyes at before! Job interview after job interview he was too qualified for so most positions out there! Really?!? You mean to say that I don’t have a job at all yet I’m too qualified for this job? DUMB! No bigger positions were open for him. It was a really frustrating time for the both of us. Now, I’m not a man, but I can say from experience and advise from friends and family around us that men take losing their job in a much harder and different way than women. It was a very, very, VERY hard thing for me to deal with. It doesn’t just effect the person who loses their job, but it effect everything and everyone around them. It takes a toll on a man’s ego, it somehow makes them feel like they aren’t worthy of your love or much of anything. It’s sends them into a depression of sorts. It’s tuff on a marriage and on the child. Who knew that just because of losing a job so many things and people would be this effected? I sure didn’t and I had to learn the hard way.

The positive about the whole situation is the fact that you learn to try and live without that second income. You try and buckle down that belt and get rid of everything you don’t need. Everything you can live without. Which kind of in a crazy way made things easier and happier. Simplicity. It made us get out in the yard and work our butts off to pick weeds and trim our roses. It made that monthly gardener fee that we hated to pay, look more and more valuable! I have a new respect for people who have to garden yards like ours!
We cooked more at home, we played more at home. We read more, we spent more time with each other. There are so many positives about cutting back on so much! You really learn to value money even more then you thought you had before!

Another BIG positive for me was having Victor be able to stay at home with Alana most of the time. (Minus a few days a week he needed for job hunting). He is a great house wife!! He cooks and he cleans and does laundry…. And he LOVES the time to take Alana to the park and story time at the library. If nothing else, the last 8 months brought him closer to Alana then I would have thought possible!

I didn’t want to blog to much about the job lose because we were really trying to move forward in a positive direction into the future and not think about it! Months and months of no job offers and you get discouraged. I couldn’t help but keep a positive attitude and remind him and myself that God has something big planned for him and it would just be a matter of time and when it came it would be great!! We started to attend this church that we really loved a few months ago. We even started to go to the young couples Bible study they had. At the end of the first group we went to they asked if anyone had any prayer requests…. Of course I had to throw us in for prayers! Victor needed a job! About 2 weeks passed by and he finally gets a great opportunity at a retail store. Yes, you’re thinking, that could be a coincidence… sure it can. But prayer also works very well when done often! While in background check with this retail chain he gets ANOTHER job offer… really? All at once? Isn’t that just how it works? If he took the retail store, he would have just been settling for it because it’s a job, and well… he didn’t have one so we were grateful for it! The second opportunity came at him in full force. Interview one day, 2nd interview and dinner the next and a job offer the next day! Let’s talk about a stressful few days!!

Today he started his new job at an awesome Hotel! If you know where we met, he’s back into that family of brands and couldn’t be in a better place!! He’s a great location right near our house and the company is if not the largest, the second largest hotel chain around! That means plenty of opportunities for growth!!! Not to mention his favorite part about the place is the fact that all the baseball teams stay there during baseball season when they come to play the Angels! Which, by the way, on his first day of work they invited him to the game tonight… not so shabby right? You couldn’t imagine how excited and happy he is to be back on his feet walking around a hotel all day! He’s a crazy hard worker and hates to be bored! He really did get the best job EVER and is sooo happy about it! I’m pretty sure I cried at least twice today on the way into work because I was so happy and relieved and happy and relieved!!

I feel like I just won an Oscar and need to thank so many people! Everyone helped in any way they could or knew how in some way or another! Emailing jobs, asking people, listening to me bitch… so many people to thank. So thank you.

We have a BIG long list of things that we need for the house, for our life and for our sanity! I’ll be posting about them as I cross them off our list!!!!

Turning off the hold music.

Angelicious!

The Blog title about sums up this bad ass night with some long lost peeps!

Mama's Day

Saturday we took Victor's mom to lunch to celebrate everything she is and how much we love her!!! This lady is one special lady to me! Most people can't stand their Mother-in-Laws but I've never had that problem! Since my mom passed away she has tried to step in a be a mom to me and I couldn't love her more for it! She loves Alana more then anyone else in the world could ever (besides Victor and I) and she treats her like her own! Happy Mother's Day to the world greatest Mother In Law!!

Sunday was a day for me to spend with Victor and Alana! I'm so very thankful to be Alana's mommy! I couldn't be any more proud of the little lady I'm raising! She's very independent and loving and sweet! She's shy when she wants to be and sings her heart out in a microphone when she wants to! She loves to read, draw, be creative, ride her bike. She's brave and so dang smart and very witty! She loves to cuddle with me and give me the biggest hugs EVER! She also reminds me all the time that "Mommy, you are my best friend" I'm so proud she is my girl! I have to thank my own mom for making me the mother I am today! I tried... and try daily to think about my mom and how she raised me and I try every day to be like my mom. I hope to some day become the woman and best friend that she was to me!! Mother's Day is always going to be so hard for me... I'll always have my breakdowns. But I have my wonderful little lady to remind me of why I am a Mother! Thank you to my wonderful hubby for making sure Alana took care of her mommy on Mother's Day!

Happy Day to the rest of the great Mom's out there! To my Grandma, sisters, Aunts and Cousins! To all my friends and my New Mommies!!!! New babies Galore around here and it warms my heart!!! The world needs more mommies!

Garden Time!

I LOVE garden time with my real life rainbow bright! She Loves to dress herself and comes up with some awesome outfits! I like to call this one her rainbow bright day! We were going out to pick some weeds and cut down some roses with the help of my Roses!


Showing off her new gardening gloves! This girl always wants to help do everything, she is my little helper! So we had to get her some gloves. She had the choice between pink and green and this is what she choose! She's rockin' them with her pink snow boots, pink hat, red sweater and orange pants!

Cinco de Molestache

For Cinco this year we headed out to the beach to share in a fun evening on the strand! My friend Karen has an awesome house right on the sand and it's a great place for happy hours!!! She had some fun props for us when we got there!

The hubs never looked so good with a stache!


Happy Cinco!! We had extra reason to be celebrating.... blog to come soon...


My bestest with me on the beach!

Yes we are rocking sombrero's and we are hot!

When does a mustache become a Molestache? Not here, but I did teach that word to several more followers of the Molestache that night!!

Cheers! - Cinco worms!?!?

I love me some KK!! Karen is one of the most amazing people you will ever meet!

The night would not be complete without some quality time on the sand watching the waves roll in with my two favorite people....

The beer stands alone...

Baby Em

Baby Em is now 9 weeks old and she is getting soooo big! She is super tall already.

Alana was so loving to her, she just wants to hold her and love her!

Martha let me babysit her for a few hours and we had so much fun! She laid on the ground looking out the back door for an entire hour just taking it all in! She loved to just lay and listen to the birds and watch the dogs!

She is so adorable and is so smiley!

Mama said knock you out!

Cheese!

This is by far my new favorite picture of her! I love this little lady!

Thank you Martha for trusting me to watch her for a few hours! I can't wait to watch her some more!!!

Amazing Race-ish

A few months ago my friend Christina at work told Crystal and I about this Urban Hunt LA that she had a groupon for. Crystal is a really big fan of Amazing Race and always talks about signing up for it one day so she wanted to do this Urban hunt really badly! It sounded like a lot of fun so we Crystal signed us up for it! You were supposed to have a team name and dress up in costumes... we kinda half assed did it. We were team "No name" for many inside joke reasons. And at the last minute got matching shirts. There were 6 teams of 2 from our group of co-workers and friends.

We drove up to LA with these 2 crazy things... We'll just call them Thang 1 and Thang 2 for the sake of their blue hair and costumes!

*Pic by Charlotte

They had a costume contest and a lot of people dressed up for it! From "The Dums" to this team named "We're right here" dressed up as Where's Waldo and then there were Angry Birds.... they were pretty funny to see. The PB&J girls won the contest.

80 teams showed up that morning to compete. Crystal and I spent the night before looking at maps and trying to get our self acquainted with Downtown LA from a map.... I printed out maps of Public Transit and Crystal went to AAA to get maps of the city! Neither of us knew what the heck we were getting ourselves into but we wanted to try to be as prepared as we could, and I honestly think we did pretty well at preparing! We had Victor at home on computer for help too!

*Pic by Charlotte


They gave all 80 teams the same paper with the clues on it and said "ready, set, go". We ripped open that envelope and headed to our first clue! There were 14 puzzles and 13 of them had to be completed and correct. For every wrong answer they would deduct 30 minutes from your time! So team No name and the things headed out!
The closest clue was: After being out of service for 9 years, this 109 year old incline railway reopened in 2010. We had to get a picture of both teammates riding this Angels Flight Railway.

We could only use Public Transportation and if you know LA, which we do NOW, but you can take the Subway, the Metro Rail or the buses. We pretty much stuck to the Subway and the Rail. We had to nagivate between different color lines of rail that took us to Union Station, Chinatown, Little Toyko, Olivera Street.

*Pic by Charlotte




There were several challenges where we had to stand in front of something to take a picture, or find something specific like a pizza, an Ice cream man, a bike helmet... this one was the jewerly we had to find in Chinatown.

While in Chinatown we had a list of items we had to buy but they were written in Chinese. So not only did we have to find someone that could read it (which was not an easy task) but we had to get them to speak enough english to tell us what the list said in English. One of our tasks was to take a picture with a "Street performer"... this guy did the trick while we were in Chinatown!

While in this Crazy district of Chinatown we had to find this one paticular store in a mile long block of stores upstairs and down and take a picture in front of the sign while wearing one of their Kimonos. We were pretty fashionable!

When we got to Little Tokyo we needed to find a certain plaza and then play a game of "Where's Waldo". Upon finding him he took us to a puzzle. We had to build a tower of Jenga pieces to be as tall as waldo's cane.... once we did that it had to stay for 5 seconds. We rocked this puzzle! I LOVE Jenga..... Crystal and I worked together as a team so well! We were both good at our own things. This was mine game for sure! Afterall, Crystal got us there!


In the midst of all the craziness one of the challenges was to fold this origami crane.... NOT an easy task..... But by the end of the race I did! It did take me a little bit all day... walking down streets, relying on Crystal to tell me when I was going to walk into someone... but I did it!!

Where were ALL over downtown LA and couldn't find one person wearing a Dodgers hat! On our way across the crosswalk to Olvera Street we found this random guy! We stopped him in the middle of a crosswalk and bombarded him with "Can we take a picture with you?" He must have thought we were crazy in the middle of the street! But we were able to cross it off our list! This guy probably went home with a good story!

One of the places I was looking forward to going to was Olvera Street. I had been a few times before and I know this is a big to-do for LA so I was hoping this was going to be on the hunt. It was!! Once we got to Olvera Street we had to do a sack hop! It was the middle of the day, it was hot and we had to jump around this fountain in sacks and a sombrero. Me first...

Then Crystal.... then me again.... As if we weren't tired enough and it was hot... this was NOT an easy challenge!

Even though this is not the picture I wanted to post of Thing 2 hoping around in a sack, I love her and she made me laugh!

Although we were running through Olvera Street to find certain things, I snapped a picture of this guy playing a Harp. I thought it was cool!

After we solved a few more clues it led us to the MOCA. We had to take a picture of both teammates in from of this crazy flying figure.

By this point in the day we were just EXHAUSTED!!! I think we figured that we ran/walked about 14 miles, along with taking who knows how many miles of planes, trains and automobiles.
In the hussle and bussle of downtown in the Jewelry District there is this random alley called St. Vincent Court. It's decorated to look like a quaint Parisian Street. It was beautiful and quite, you would never know it was there if you weren't looking for it! We had to take some random pictures there to prove we found it!

Our last stop for the afternoon was a random puzzle that we had Victor figure out while we were running around. It was a pain to find, they called it the Upside down rocker, We pointed to the winning yellow car!

This experience was none like any other!!! We came to our ending point and saw so many teams sitting having a drink already.... Out of 80 teams Crystal and I were #54. Yep, 54. We did the best we could and we did great!!! Charlotte and Christina came in with us but Crystal and I logged in first, but we did the whole thing as a team of 4 all day! The day was so much fun learning all about LA. Running around the city like crazy people with our blue haired friends! It was an awesome experience that we want to do again and again!!! Different cities, different people. I'm pretty sure we are all hooked now! After a blog like this, aren't you?

Thanks to the husbands at home and the great teammate and best friend I had! Thanks to the Things for a great day! Can't wait for Urban Hunt #2!