Author Archives: Jackie

First snow of the season.

Genny and Marie's first snowmanFriday we had our first winter storm come through. This snow is so early, the leaves haven’t fallen off the trees yet. Southern California is great, we get to do our business all week long without snow, then we go up to our cabin and pretend we’re from the Great White North.

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Too many clothes

We are blessed with too many clothes.

Marie likes to keep everything.  She might not wear it, she has favorite outfits and the rest get ignored, or maybe she just feels good about having full drawers, I don’t exactly know what the deal is.  The bottom line is she can’t find anything and everyday she dumps all these clothes out in a heaping pile while she looks for that one special shirt.  Then comes the ugly part.  Getting her to clean it up so someone doesn’t report her to the hoarder reality program.  Sometimes I think the heap left behind is high enough for her to pack a lunch to take while climbing.  Now, I’m not an organized person, I can come up with the plan but usually I’m not willing to execute it or maintain it.  But this time we did it.  I laid out long lines of items sorted by type, then we divided all the matching outfits into 4 separate piles and stored them in gift bags.  One pile for her drawers and three for later.  Each week when her drawers are empty, I give her the next gift bag, do the laundry and pack those items away for later.  We’ll see how it goes.

 

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Rain Gutter Regatta

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Roy is a Webelo II in Orange County’s Cub Scout pack 1.  It’s a great group of boys and their families, with super leadership.  On this day they competed in the Rain Gutter Regatta.  Each boy gets a standard cub scout boat kit to put together and decorate for race day.  Some of the kids spent lots of time decorating and others just focused on the race.  Roy had his internet savvy mother googling the fastest design.  Hands down it was a catamaran.  The boat is lighter and more stable and on youtube it just zipped down the rain gutter while the other kids were turning blue from puffing so hard.  So with Dad and Grandpa Bud’s assistance Roy showed up on race day with his sleek new catamaran.  But there was only one problem, I couldn’t understand why no one else thought of this great design. The opinion on the internet was that the catamaran couldn’t lose. Well we soon found the reason for his unique racer, it was ILLEGAL in the rule sheet we neglected to read.  So, poor Roy got to race, but his boat was disqualified.  He did get to the end of the course in record time and that made him happy even if he didn’t go home with an award.

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Archery

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Roy and Genny just wrapped up their first 6 weeks of Archery lessons and are about to start another 6 weeks.  They are loving it!  The instructor, Janet Dykman, has been great and we highly recommend her class on Monday mornings in El Dorado Park.

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Halloween

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Halloween is all about great fun with friends and lots of candy.  This year we had our usual park day party, attended Tabitha and Sophie’s party, went to a carnival sponsored by Good Shepherd church, visited PJ to had out candy and finished up the day with trick or treating in the Sexton family’s neighborhood.

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Disneyland

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This week we had two adventures at Disneyland.  Monday night we went to an Annual Passholder special event and then on Friday we attended a field trip with our school, Sky Mountain Charter School.  The kids attended a class about motion and lights while they were escorted around the park by Disney instructors.

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Exposition Park

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We signed up for the California Science Center’s monthly homeschool classes this year.  Roy, Genny and Marie are in classrooms with same grade kids, a few are old friends and they are making new friends too.  The science center is in Exposition Park right next to a beautiful rose garden as well as the Natural History museum.  After class the kids have fun touring the museum and smelling the roses.

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The Sexton family in Angelus Oaks

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Having our cabin in Angelus Oaks is like having two homes and two lives.  Most of the time our beach friends don’t meet our mountain friends visa versa. Occasionally we have visitors come check out our other life.  This weekend the Sexton family, celebrating Monica’s 7th birthday, came to the mountains for the weekend.  We had a great time playing around the house, adventuring in the forest, and visiting Roy’s mining claim with a mountain bike ride.

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Camping at Bolsa Chica

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Last spring Karen made reservations for us and this last Sunday – Wednesday we all camped at Bolsa Chica State Beach, which is just down the road from us.  It’s basically a parking lot with hookups right in front of the beach.  The kids could run, play, and dig anytime they wanted.  Then we all would go down to the water while they surfed and boogie boarded. The camp is only a mile from dog beach, so I was able take the bike path there and let Topaz have some fun too.  The weather was nice when it was sunny, but we had a storm come through and soak us on Tuesday morning.  Since I’m in a tent trailer, I decided to leave late Tuesday night while everything was dry and avoid the storm coming through on Wednesday.

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Mill Creek

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