More party fun

Superhero strikes again. Here is my bargain basement pinata. It actually doesn't look too bad in the pictures. It also holds a LOT of candy which might not be a good thing.

After a summer of birthday parties, Jakey's pinata swing is improving. He's really learning to get his weight behind his swing.

Good old Guinness Chocolate cake. Death by chocolate, but such a pleasant way to go.

Here is Mr. Cake face admiring his presents. We had a hard time getting him to move from present to present. He always wanted to just open up the present he just got and play with that one for a while.

Jakey's party

Fun food made its appearance at the party. We tried to have all of Jakey's favorites. In the jars, we had kettle corn, oatmeal cookies, chex mix and animal crackers. Of course we also had dinosaur cake and his favorite sandwiches.

Jakey spent a lot of time in the pool. He had a great time with his friends. He probably would have stayed there the whole time if we didn't force him to get out and eat something.

I found these awesome foam animal visors at Michael's. All the kids got one and got to wear them at the party. Jakey had a few that he was interchanging depending on his mood.

Here is our visiting superhero trying his hand at the beanbag toss. Love the cape!

New paint job!!!

Our house just got freshly painted. The base color is pretty similar, but it's all patched and painted evenly now. The big difference is the trip color. We have 2 colors now instead of just one, and we chose sage green and dark red for the contrasting trim colors. We are SO happy with how it all turned out. Our painters did a great job.

They sanded the door and refinished it, so now the oak veneer comes out instead of being painted over.

They also suggested painting the garage door to match the house. It also makes a big difference.

Mother's Beach

We don't go to the beach much, but we might come back to this one. This is a little inlet, so there aren't really any waves. Lots of moms and kids hang out here, so the crowd is friendly. Jakey had a great time and could have stayed here longer.

Quilt for J

This quilt was made for one of the girls at NH. It was so much fun to make something for one of our girls. She just turned 16 this July and she has such a heartbreaking and inspiring story of her own. She was brave enough to share part of her journey at church and I was inspired to make a quilt for her. I wanted to do a collaborative quilt with butterflies as the theme, and initially approached my quilt group to see if they could help. Since this is vacation time, a lot of them were going to be out of town and unavailable. My next idea was to approach the youth to see if they would be interested. Girls much younger than they have learned to embroider and do it well in the past. I was surprised by the overwhelming response.

Both boys and girls from the youth group responded to make squares for her. I think we had 10 kids and a few adults make squares and I made 5 more to fill in the gaps. It was fun to put a project like this together and see how proud the kids were to give it to her at her surprise birthday party.

Aquarium Day

This was our first visit to the LB Aquarium. It's not as good as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but Jakey didn't know the difference.

I don't know who is scarier, Jakey or that shark. The cool thing about this aquarium is that they did have a shark pool where you could touch little sharks.

Someday he's going to be embarrassed about this picture. I just love how kids are so un-selfconscious at this age.

And of course, copying is cool at this age too.

Denver and NM

We went to a great Children's Museum in Denver. There was so much for Jacob to do. One exhibit had clothes for the kids to dress up in and little places for them to play. He is a little sheep playing in the bird's nest.

My birthday breakfast contribution for Amy: dutch babies. I love how puffy and light they get. This was my first time blending up the batter in a blender. I think I might have to make that a regular part of the recipe.

Nate and I got away for a few days to Taos. We took the back way to get there and stopped at this church in Chimayo. I love all of the adobe in NM.

Changes

Wow! I can't believe I haven't blogged in about 2 months. We have been on vacation. That's all I can say. We had a great trip to Colorado and New Mexico--I'll try to post some pictures later. I have also been trying to make some changes in my life involving a better diet and more exercise. While in Colorado, I came across this book. It's called Ultra Metabolism. I had been wanting to make some dietary changes this summer and this book seemed interesting. I loved the suggestions he made and how he important a good diet is for your overall health, and not just for your weight. Then, when I got home I found out that I have high blood sugar, so it gave me extra incentive to work on my diet and exercise. Since then I have cut out sugar and wheat products from my diet. I am in the detox phase right now. I can re-introduce small amounts of those things later, but so far it hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be. I had a few headaches the first few days, but since then I have had good energy, and have felt pretty good.

I also started doing an exercise program called cross-fit with a few girls from church. It has also been good. The workouts are short, but intense and at first I was unable to complete them. After a few weeks, I am able to complete them with no problem. Right now I am also reading Anticancer: A new way of life, which is also a great book. As most of you know, I am a cancer survivor of more than 10 years. This book makes it clear that diet and lifestyle choices do have an effect on cancer in prevention and keeping cancer in remission longer. I had not heard this information clearly stated this way before. Both of these books confirm the choices I have been making this summer and encourage me to keep going.

A typical day's food for me will look like this:
Breakfast: Banana, blueberry and soy milk shake with flax seeds
Snack: Almonds and fruit
Lunch: Cannelini bean salad, fruit
Snack: Veggies with hummus
Dinner: Fish or Chicken with vegetables and wild rice or quinoa

I feel really lucky that we have access to so much cheap, good quality produce in California. There are so many different kinds of fruit that I don't really miss desserts that much.