Violin for Graham

Next year - for 4th Grade, Graham gets to choose an instrument.  For the longest time, he kept saying Tuba, but I think it was mostly to irk me!  Well, he finally made up his mind when the Mobile Music Van dropped by the school earlier this spring.  He has decided on the violin!

I was hoping to actually rent one from the studio where Graham will be taking lessons from but they didn't have one available.  So, we decided to just go ahead and purchase one online.  Hopefully it will stand up to the task (and not neglect!):

We learned a few things trying to tune it and also trying to play it.  Who knew you needed to actually rub "rosin" on the hair of the bow so the violin would actually make a sound!  And I definitely can't play the violin because being slightly long-sighted now, I can't see the strings up close.  LOL!!!

Graham was suppose to have his first trial lesson today but unfortunately his teacher locked her keys in the car.  Oops!!!  So we are scheduled for next week instead.  In the meantime, Charlie took his first piano trial class and he loved it!  Hopefully Daddy can work out the budgie for all of this! :-D

Taco Tuesday Golf

Last Tuesday was Taco Tuesday Golf at one of the local public golf courses.  I don't play there a lot because it takes FOREVER to finish 18 holes!  I was told that during the weekend, it takes over 6 hours to play.  That is just ridiculous!

Anyhow, I still take the boys out there to practice.  The view is really pretty.  Not sure if you can see, but it is actually ocean in the backdrop here:

Daddy gets to join us today for our first family golf in SoCal!

Good thing I packed some pb & Nutella sandwiches.  Some waiting but not too bad for 6pm:

Family we-fie! 

What a fun night!  The tacos at the golf course restaurant wasn't too bad either.  Graham and Charlie were both able to have tacos from the buffet as well for $10 total.  What a steal!  Hopefully more Taco Tuesday Golf to come, although we didn't leave until 830pm.  Late night for the kids!

Happy Father's Day

The celebrations continue!  4 days after my birthday, it is Father's Day.  We head off to Costa Mesa to eat at our favorite restaurant - Seasons 52.  We are a few minutes early, so we head into the mall first:

Boys are drooling over the chocolate covered strawberries at the Godiva store:

Mommy drools over expensive lipstick holders - $200 worth of it but hey, it's covered with over 300 Swarovski crystals.  Hmmm... if I can't spell Swarovski without looking it up, perhaps I can't quite own one yet then!

We made an online reservation for 11:15am.  It's nice as it is still nice and quiet in the restaurant:

And our waiter was nice enough to take our family photo for us! Looks like I need to work on my we-fie :-)

The food was excellent, as usual!  We had shrimp with cheddar polenta (Super YUM!!!) and Charlie had French Toast - which ended up being my dessert!  Daddy had some of everything including avocado toast and also breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon.  Come to think of it, I believe the boys inhaled the bacon.  Ha ha! And they definitely gobbled up the little desserts.  Graham was saving some on his cheek for later:

Charlie did NOT want to share his S'more dessert:

Somehow they love posing with this lion outside the restaurant:

After brunch, we are back into the mall to walk off all that food.  We drop in the Lego store for a bit.  Can you believe this Lego car is $350??!  Okay, fair enough it's a Buggati :-P

Although I would rather pay $350 for the Lego trains.  I am still wanting a train track/set for our backyard!

This mall is in an entire different universe.  We walk by the Harry Winston jewelry store.  Looks like they have thought of everything as seen in this pair of earrings below.  If the woman can't decide which stone she likes best, she can have all of them! Emerald, rubies, and sapphires, and not forgetting the diamonds. WOOOAAAHHH...!!!

After the mall, we decided to stop by Seal Beach for a little while.  Well, it was really quite just a little while because Charlie fell asleep in the car.  So it was just me and Graham at the playground for a bit:

Oh, we did buy Daddy a basketball this Father's Day.  We forgot to wrap it and it is still sitting in the garage.  Although Bobby did notice the basketball a few days prior as I didn't hide it very well in the garage.  And looks like I'm slacking a bit with the "Momma duties" :-P  In any case, hope to take the basketball out this weekend for a game!

More recent happenings

Here is Graham's biome which he worked with two other kids in his 3rd Grade class called "Ocean".  It was actually a project from a month or so ago.  Obviously I have been late posting this:

Graham cleverly braided the green seaweed and I helped him a little with his horseshoe crab.  We used clay and also provided some spray glue and sand for the project.  Not too shabby! I told him we couldn't keep the Biome forever so I took these photos and saved his horseshoe crab for safe-keeping:

I had my 6-month follow-up on my retina Friday of last week. Fingers crossed, so far so good!  The doc did say that my left retina is thinning though.  Hmmm... hopefully no more flashing lights! But in the meantime, we found a cool little area in Pasadena:

And didn't waste our chance for 2nd breakfast!

I did find a Chinese restaurant not far from this restaurant so looking forward to that in 6 months!

In the meantime, the boys bought me an electronic Uno game for my birthday:

We are trying to have No Electronics Day once a week.  This is what happened today:

Ha ha!  No Electronics Day is definitely messier than the boys just watching TV and playing their tablets!  I finally caved in at night and let the boys watch a movie after dinner.  PHEW!!! Who knew No Electronics Day was such hard work!

Last weekend we went to pick up some firewood.  A lady had posted about the firewood on one of these local neighborhood Apps.  This was what we picked up in one load.  Thankfully Momma remembered to bring the dollie.  Now the firewood has taken up the space for the boys' balance bike and scooters.  Might have to rethink this one:

This lady's home was in a gated community that I always wanted to check out.  It's just off the "roller-coaster" road as we put it because this area is in an active landslide area and the roads are constantly breaking up!  Well, nonetheless, the home was amazing!  Just like a villa in Italy!!!  I obviously didn't take any photos but perhaps will be back there again once we are out of firewood.  She had 3 big piles of it!  And you could also hear peacocks and coyotes.  We spotted quite a few peacocks while taking the "scenic" route on the way out of the neighborhood:

The only other exciting thing going on here is my orchid plant.  It's actually growing!  I managed to kill the other orchid plant in this same pot so hopefully I will be more careful with this one.  This new growth/stalk almost looks like a worm!

And on the opposite end of this happiness is sadness.  This was our kitchen sink over the weekend!  Of course the clog had to happen on a Saturday and we couldn't get in touch with our regular plumber.  It would have cost $295 to get another plumber late Saturday afternoon.  So, that meant take-outs, eating out, and disposal plates and silverware.  In a way,... Yay!!!

The one time I see Bobby using the garbage disposer and this happens.  I really wonder if he set that up!  I mean, he doesn't even really do dishes but now perhaps he is even hoping he doesn't have to put the dishes in the sink??!  We attempted to dump some Drano down the drain on Saturday but that didn't help.  But at least it cleared up all of those shredded veggies and I managed to scoop up the rest of the water and dumped it outside. $95 later on Monday, the drain has been "snaked" again (we did it when we first moved in) so hopefully all clear at least for a little while longer!

Happy birthday to ME! (June 12)

Another year older!  I managed to lie to Charlie last year about my age, but he has grown smarter this year.  So I can't tell him that I am 34 this year :-P  And Graham is definitely too smart for his age!

We headed out to the beach on my birthday.  One of the mom's from school invited us to the beach.  Since I had nothing planned for the day, I figured it would be a good day to spend on the beach. There were about 7 families - with all boys and 1 girl!

Charlie has hijacked my chair and umbrella:

It was pretty cloudy all day.  The boys enjoyed playing with the kite although towards the end of the day, Graham lost the line and it ended up in the bushes.  Glad the shrub didn't tear up the kite or tangle the line but that was enough for me to put it away for the rest of the day:

The waves were a bit bigger than 2 days ago when we came out bodyboarding. And there were so many dolphins close by! Couple of them even jumped out of the water.  Didn't manage to take any photos of the dolphins.  Maybe next time I need to bring my big camera out to the beach:

I decided to get our wagon back out to carry all of our stuff from the car to the beach and back.  How on earth did we accumulate so much stuff just for one trip to the beach??!  3 bodyboard, towels, change of clothes, one big umbrella, one small umbrella, one kite, and of course snacks and water. Good thing Graham insisted on pulling it up the ramp :-)

Bobby joined us for dinner after work.  By this point, we had already spent about 4 hours on the beach.  I was ready to eat!

Such monkeys!!!  We tried a new restaurant across the street from our favorite crepe restaurant.  It was not as good as I was expecting.  Although the lava cake didn't stand a chance!

And since I really didn't get to blow out a candle the day of my birthday, I grabbed one of the two remaining bundt cakes from the fridge (from Graham's birthday) and had the boys sing to me the following day.  Chocolate Chocolate Chip is quite yummy first thing in the morning :-D

The US Open is on this week so I get to watch that on TV while I admire my sun-burnt feet.  Funny enough I actually put some sunscreen on the boys' feet and totally ignored putting any on my own feet. Definitely learned my lesson.  Thankfully it wasn't bad enough to peel.  What a mess that would have been!

By the way, before being able to relax and watch golf, I had to clean up the house after the trip to the beach!  An appraiser was coming to the house the day after my birthday as we are planning on refinancing the house.  And of course, the house is almost always in a mess!  But who knew we had that much floor to show once all the stuff was dumped in the garage. LOL!

The house actually showed quite well despite it being quite busy with all the excess furniture.  The appraiser even said "You have a nice house", which made me very happy!

Now I just have to make sure I clear up some of that additional stuff I had put in the garage.  I even put our dirty laundry in there. HA HA HA!!!

Another birthday done! I think Charlie is the happiest now because he proceeded to say "Now, it's MY birthday next!!!"  Poor kid has to go through 3 birthdays in a row within a month before his turn to celebrate.  He is coming up with all sorts of ideas.  Might take a whole week to celebrate his birthday! :-)

Fire engine fun

The local fair was on last weekend.  We were there mostly because Charlie was representing his Chinese school by singing and dancing one song on stage.  I told the teacher to put him towards the back row as he didn't practice so much, but he did fine!

Graham was suppose to dance and sing too, but he said he has stage fright.  Hmmm... but he was fine on stage in school for his recorder recital!  And I have never seen/heard him practice at home :-\

Back to the fire truck story!  It was one of these really long fire trucks with a driver's seat at the end of the truck:

I managed to convince the Captain to let the boys get in there :-)

Graham and Charlie had a good time! They learned from the Captain that in order to turn the truck left, you need to steer the wheel right and vice versa.  Sounds super tricky! And it's also super bumpy back there from what another fireman was explaining:

Then, the boys got to see the ladder truck in action!  While we were admiring the truck, somehow a tree branch had fallen over - blocking one side of the street. So the fire truck started up and then made this maneuver where it sort of glided sideways to the other side of the street.  Even Bobby was impressed!!!

I think that was the most excitement for the day.  We didn't let the boys ride on any fair rides.  Is that bad??!  Everything seems so expensive!

Maybe when they are older, they can buy their own fair wristbands and go with their high-school friends?!?

Recent happenings

I've been trying to decorate Graham and Charlie's bathroom a bit.  So far, this is the only thing I have come up with:

I have seen this saying on t-shirts and also elsewhere on the internet.  So I bought a blank white board and wrote it down for the boys.  Perhaps if we get bored with this saying, I can switch it up to something else :-)

The trampoline has another rip!  This time it is on the area where the boys climb in and out of:

I bought some fun fabric and some new foam.  Who knew foam is so expensive!

I have placed the fabric and foam but haven't really attached it yet properly.  In time... :-)

In the meantime, I have been busy with more succulents.  I found this heart shape clay that Graham made in Abu Dhabi.  I figured, why not!

There are still so many succulents that I volunteered to plant some by my friend's office:

I'm not sure if the succulents will survive though as there is no sprinkler system.  I guess only time will tell:

And PS: Something else has invaded the backyard!!!

I posted this photo on a neighborhood app and seems that it is called "4 o'clocks".  Supposedly they bloom until 4pm??!  Well, they have been self-seeding and making more and more plants in the yard!  Pretty but more than happy to give them away if anyone wants them!!!  AaaahhhhhHHH!!!

Another thing happening around here, we have picked up some "blue signs" as the City calls it.  My attempt to get speed bumps and other traffic calming suggestions were completely shot down.  This will have to do for now.  The City did put a mobile radar on the top of the hill, but it's by a Stop sign.  How will that tell the driver how fast they are going if they are needing to stop at the Stop sign??!

Here's our new mailbox!  The boys and I have been busy browsing around an antique store in San Pedro and actually spotted an old rotary phone.  Instead, I spotted this pretty mailbox and got this instead.  I have have to take this with me if/when we move away!

I tried to microwave some brown rice and as you can tell, it didn't work very well.  I knew I should have just taken the time to do it on the stove top!

And how is it still foggy on the hill???!  It's June!!!  At least that's how it was during the last week of school for the boys:

It's been warm this week - to a point it's 85F in the house!  I just cleaned out our old-looking air conditioner unit in the back living room.  I managed to cool down the house 1-2 degrees in like 1 hour. I wonder what our electricity bill will look like this month.  So far, the solar panels have generated LOTS!  We have only had to pay the minimal payment of about $5 the past few months!

Maybe if I put a nice wooden frame around the a/c unit and added some framed photos on the wall? You think the ugly a/c might blend in??? LOL!

Learned something new called Macrame last week.  It was a free class at the local library.  Charlie actually wanted to learn it when he saw this:

We'll see how long these air-plants will last.  You are suppose to soak them in water once a week for about 15 minutes.  Fingers crossed!