First days of summer

Summer is officially upon us. Last week I started getting brave and took the boys to the pool during the day while Tyler was at work. It is finally hot here so the pool feels wonderful. Ted has a floaty that he wears and he is brave enough with it on to swim over to the deep end of the pool. I discourage this since I have Tidus in my arms, but I do love his enthusiasm. Tidus has his floating island but I suspect he is reaching the age where he does not want to sit in his personal floaty anymore but he is too small to wear a life jacket. This means I get the pleasure of holding him the entire time. He does enjoy standing on the steps and splashing in the water. I enjoy giving my arms a break. And it is fun to see Ted coming out of his shell and playing with the other kids at the pool.

Yesterday we walked to Home Depot and bought supplies to make a water table. This idea came from the What's Up Moms YouTube channel. I can be counted on to try out most of their craft ideas. I already had quite a bit of pvc piping from previous projects. Ted chose the color orange to paint it and of course when daddy arrived home all calm and polite water table play went out the window. I was soaked by the end... I'm not a fan of spontaneous water fights so you can imagine how thrilled I was with this.

This post is being typed from my cell phone while baby sleeps on me. He is sleeping through the night which is absolute heaven! Unfortunately naps continue to be a battle. Today I surrendered and am just letting him nap in my arms. The alternative is to put him in his crib and have him scream at me for an hour. Ted has been left to his own devises. Thank goodness for living in an apartment. It is so much easier to handle two kids when they can't get very far from me at any given moment.

Pugs at the Beach

 In Southern California when summertime hits all the pug meet ups head to the beach!

Also can we take a second to truly appreciate just how many pug groups there are in California... the ones that I know of are the Central Coast Pug Group, LA Pug Meetup, Long Beach Pug Meetup, Newport Beach Pug Meetup, and OC Pug Saturday. Only one of those is not within reasonable driving distance for us. We could be doing a pug thing almost every Saturday! Plus the last Sunday of every month!

Okay back to today. The Long Beach Pug Meetup and the LA Pug Meetup both planned activities at the same dog beach at the same time and day. I don't think they did this intentionally but obviously everyone just ended up joining together. There were over 100 pugs playing at the beach and it was a blast! Ruby LOVES the ocean. She loves to dig in the sand, she doesn't mind the waves, and she is obsessed with playing fetch with shells.

 I follow a lot of pugs on her Instagram account and I was trying to recognize other pugs but it is kind of hard. Mean Mug Pug Ozzy was there and her brother Kubrick. Gidget the surf pug was there. Afterwards I went on Instagram to see who else came and posted pictures.

 Tyler is pretty much amazing. He has about a million things he needs to do at work and he knew how important this was to me so he went. When the meet up was over he went home and showered and then headed back in to work.

Here he is with a bunch of pugs on him.

 In the background of this picture you can see Gidget surfing. Apparently there is a breaker out in the water at this beach so there really were very few waves but she was still able to catch a couple. It was cool to watch up close because you can really tell that she is moving on the board to keep it balanced.

All three of my children were thrown into the tub and hosed down. 

The end of a fun and tiring event for Rubert. 

Homeschooling has begun!

For a few years I have been considering doing homeschool with Ted. I have read several books, tons of blogs, and even gone to a homeschool convention. Of course I have also said many prayers on the subject and had talks with Tyler too. For our family this feels like the path we want to take, at least for now. I am all about taking it one grade at a time. Before now I have been doing small toddler focused activities with Ted.

Ted just turned three and we felt it was time to put a bit more focus and structure toward Ted's education. Thank goodness for people who blog and create printables!! They are the most amazing people ever! I use several different blogs including 1+1+1=1 and Simply Learning  and Pinterest ;)

For now each unit will last 2 weeks. What I like about homeschool is that this can change. If Ted is miserable with a specific topic then we don't have to keep going with it. Adversely, if he is loving a topic then we certainly can keep it going. Each day we spend about 30-60 min on "preschool" time where we sit down at his table to do activities and worksheets. We take this time to learn letters, numbers, etc. Then throughout the rest of the day I try to find activities that can also be educational like story time at the library, walks through the park, trips to the beach and this past week we went to the aquarium.

As you can tell from the picture, our first unit was ocean themed. I also checked out a few books from the library on the ocean.

So far Ted is loving it. He even requests to do activities and preschool time. It is so much fun to spend time with him and see him figure things out and then later in the day apply what he has learned to real life. He is just amazing :)

Meeting Gidget the Surf Pug

A while ago I created an Instagram account for Ruby. She follows lots of cute little pugs :) One such pug is Gidget the Surf Pug. Gidget and her family live in Southern California and just so happened to be coming to Huntington Beach this past weekend for a surf dog competition. Actually it was the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge. I have watched these competitions on ESPN in the past so it is cool that it is being hosted so close to where we live. 

I told Gidget on Instagram that we are coming to cheer her on :) 

It was quite the challenge getting us to this competition on a Friday morning. We had to drive Tyler to work so we could have the car for the day (sorry we made you late Tyler :( ) Then when we got home I drove around a ton to try and find where the surfing event was being held. It was 2 miles down the beach from where the rest of the events were taking place. 

By the time we arrived Gidget had already done her first round. I was so bummed but I still worked put the courage to go introduce myself. Luckily she had made the finals and would be surfing another round. Her two owners were so nice to let us come see Gidget and talk to them. Of course we did not talk long at first because we did not want to distract the surfing pug :) 

So we hung out on the beach watching other surf dogs until the final round. 

 Tidus still loves the beach :) He is getting some crazy sun bleached hair down here.

 Here is my funny story for the beach. You will notice from the pictures that this was a very overcast day. Apparently Huntington Beach is known for May Grey and June Gloom. Almost every day starts out completely overcast. But by about 3PM it has all burned off and it is then a hot sunny day.

Before we left in the morning I made sure to put sunscreen on the kids. While they were playing in the sand a lady (one of the surf dog owners) came up to me and asked if I lived around there. I told her yes and she inquired if I knew that this kind of weather is the most dangerous as far as sun damage. Probably because it is deceptively cold and cloudy but you can still get burned. She then asked if the kids had sunscreen on. I told her yes they did, they are my pail babies and she was like oh ok good job, you are a great mom.

It was not offensive at all I didn't mind her asking.

We were sitting about 10 feet from another family that had little white hair babies the same ages as Ted and Tidus and I thought to myself, I wonder why she singled me out and not them. Then I noticed that their entire family was very tan. No tan lines. They just looked like a family that grew up in a sunny climate. We have lived here since last fall and we still look like we are just vacationing from Washington :) it made me laugh.

Finally it was Gidget's turn to surf in the finals. For each round a person would blast an airhorn and two dogs and their handlers ran out into the wave. A group of guys in yellow went out as well. They are the safety helpers. Each dog had at least 3 people guiding them through the water. 

In this pic you can see Gidget on the right and another little white dog on the right. That dog took first and Gidget took second. 

 I took a pic of the cameraman on the stand filming the competition.

 After the surfing was over the winning dogs were interviewed. This was the winner for the large dog competition. The large dogs are fun to watch because they don't really stand on the boards as much. They lie down. There was even a great dane that was really good.

 When all was done we got pictures with Gidget. She is a purebred all white pug. She is so stinking cute I can't handle it! And I love that my kids like dogs. They both loved seeing all the dogs run around on the beach.

 I don't know if you can tell but at this point Tidus was so dead tired. He was falling asleep in my arms and then I just plopped him on the ground for a photo hahaha. Oh the things my boys put up with...

They're eating each other!

Tyler and I should never make a trip to the pet store together. When we go by ourselves everything is fine. We purchase the items we went for and head home. When we go together things get crazy. It was when we went together that we impulsively bought two parakeets. They were stinking cute and fun to have but we found a new home for them when moved 2 states away. A couple weeks ago we went to the pet store together and came home with two beta fish. We are much too impulsive... and we are suckers for promotional events.

I was looking for a good brush for Ruby (I did not find one) and ended up finding a cute new harness for her from the Martha Stewart collection. It has a little pink felt flower on the back.

While I was shopping, Tyler took Ted over to a table where children could decorate their own fish bowl. Well of course when you decorate a fish bowl you have to buy a fish to put in it. And you can't just use a little fish bowl because the fish need lots of room right??? sigh... well one thing lead to another and Tyler found this beta tank that has a divider in the middle so you can get two beta in the same tank. We brought it home and set them all up.

Everything was fine for about a week and then we noticed that the fish were becoming hostile toward each other. The divider is not solid. It has slots in it and for some reason the fish fight through the holes. The bigger beta was taking chunks out of the smaller one!!!! I was so mad. The big beta was banished back to the small fish bowl that Ted had originally decorated and small beta was given free range of the entire big tank. You could tell big beta was ticked at this new arrangement. If he could I am sure he would have taken out his rage on me.

Tyler, being the animal rights activist that he is went back to the pet store and purchased two new small tanks for each fish so they would have their own space. We set the tanks next to each other but the fish must face opposite directions because they still try to attack even though they are 100% separate. The small tanks are what are pictured up top.

Oh, and the fish do have names. They are Nemo and Dory. I don't know which is which... I just call them jerk fish and the fish that got a hurt.

Ted Turns 3

This is the one and only picture I took on Ted's birthday. I really just wanted to enjoy spending time with him and not worry about documenting every moment of the day. Also I have been pretty much running on fumes the last week or so. Tidus is "sleeping" worse than ever. He wakes up at least 4 times each night and during the day his naps are a mere 20-30 min long. I'm... so... tired...

Tyler's mom and brother flew down for the entire weekend. This was a gift from Tyler to his mom but I surprised Tyler by setting up an early birthday present adventure while they were here.

The day before Ted's birthday I set up a snorkeling tour for Tyler and James. It was down in Laguna Beach on this small semi-private beach called Wood Cove. The houses surrounding the beach were gorgeous! While the boys went out in the water, Ted and I hung out on the beach. Shirlyn and Tidus stayed in the car for a while because baby was asleep.

The instructor's names was Dalton. He brought all the supplies for snorkeling but James and Tyler had some of their own gear. They put on their wetsuits up by Dalton's car. 

 Then we all headed down a long steep staircase to the beach.

 When we got to the beach the guys finished up getting their masks and fins on.

 Notice the gorgeous houses lining this small beach. I loved looking out at the ocean but it was also cool checking out these houses.

 This is my favorite picture. I just think it is so funny.

 Apparently the water was FREEZING! I feel bad because I scheduled the tour for 11AM. I should have scheduled it for later in the day so the sun would be out and the water would be a little warmer and clearer. This just shows how little I know about snorkeling... oh well

 Off they go...

 It was really relaxing hanging out on the beach with Ted. For the majority of the time we had it all to ourselves.

 Ted would not go near the water. This picture of him by the rocks is about as close as I could get him. I do not blame him. The water crashing against the rocks was pretty loud and scary. A plus though was that this beach has almost zero wind. The houses surrounding it blocked the wind which made it nice and warm even when the clouds filled the sky.

 Ted brought Tyler's old camera that does not work anymore and took lots of pictures.

 Eventually the sun came out and the jackets came off. Tidus woke up so I went and brought him back with Shirlyn.

 Here they come all nice and cold.

 When James and Tyler were all finished we stayed at the beach a little while longer so they could warm up and relax. As you can see my lense got gunk on it so the pictures became hazy.

MEMORIAL DAY AT THE BEACH

 For the last day of our long weekend we spent some time at Huntington Beach. It was more crowded than I have ever seen it but that is alright.

 Tyler buried Tidus in the sand. Contrary to what this picture looks like, Tidus actually enjoyed it.

 Ted looking through a magnifying glass James bought for him.

 Ted getting buried in the sand.