JeffKatieEmma.com

I know, I know.  It’s been forever since we updated the site here.  I’ll confess that we’ve been putting updates in Facebook instead.  For those of you that aren’t on Facebook, I apologize!

Since it’s been so long since we updated the site, it’s safe to say lots of things have happened.  We had a great summer and spent a lot of time out at the lake.  Emma got to spend a lot of time with her cousins and Ryan has visited her a bunch here at home.  Aunt Jean took the kids on a number of adventures this summer including lots of trips to Enchanted Village and Wild Waves (they all had season passes), the Museum of Flight, Family Fun Center, parks, and a couple trips to the beaches.

We spent a week out at the lake on vacation in August and took a couple day trips around the Hood Canal area including a trip out to Lake Cushman.  It was very relaxing and nice to just get away for awhile.

Katie and Jeff’s jobs are going well, which is an extra blessing in this economy!  Emma was due to start school on August 31st but the teacher strike has put us on a day for day slide.  Emma is really looking forward to starting school in the first grade.  She is doing very well with her reading.  Halfway through kindergarten she was assessed and was reading at the 5th grade level.  She has continued to read and improve so I’d venture to guess she’s reading at the sixth grade level at this point.  She recently completed her 1000 minutes for the King County Library summer reading program.  She also seems to be catching on to math quite well lately too.  She has pretty much mastered the ability to count money.  Go figure.  We talk a lot about saving money and she is catching on to making choices on whether to save or spend money and is experiencing how it feels when she makes the choice to buy something and watch her $ balance go down.

I attended my 20 year HS reunion in August.  It’s hard to believe it’s been so long since high school.  It was fun to see people that I haven’t seen in 20 years and a few of us have kept in touch since the reunion.  It’s really interesting to see what people are doing after 20 years!

Anyway, just wanted to check in on the site and put in a short update.  Sorry about the length of time since the last update!

Emma and the whole family had lots of fun on the 4th. 

Emma’s favorite part…

the 800 shot roman candles

Ryan’s favorite part…

when Nathan put his 10 shot roman candle in the drainage pipe

Katie’s favorite part…

DJ jazzy Jeff

im out of time

Ryan

www.youtube.com/pieguy2772

Okay, maybe just one of us is having that issue.  Emma has started to lose her teeth.  So far she has lost two on the bottom.  Each of them have been getting loose over the last couple months.  Emma finally decided she wanted each one out (separated by about a month) so she just started pushing each forwards and backwards until they got loose and then yanked each out.  She found it humorous when each were bleeding a bit afterward.  I continue to be amazed at how tough she is.  We’ve been working with her to make sure she knows it’s okay to cry when something hurts.  At this point, she takes great pride in being “tough”.

Emma is doing well in school.  She has been reading a lot!  The school decided to assess her reading skills and, when it was all said and done, it turns out she is reading at the 4th grade level and she’s only in kindergarten!  Her word recognition and comprehension are very good.  Needless to say we are very proud of her.

Work is going well for both of us.  Of course it’s getting busier and busier with the layoffs going on around us but both of us should be pretty safe from an employment standpoint.

We’re very anxious for summer to get here.  Each day that the sun comes out and the temperature gets above 65 we can just feel the excitement.  We are looking forward to memorial day when we’ll kick off the summer season out at the lake.  We have lots of fun activities planned out there for the summer.  It sure would be nice if we could spend the entire summer out there but unfortunately there’s the whole pesky work thing keeping us in town.

Sorry it’s been so long since we have made an update here.  It’s funny how life just keeps us busy.  There hasn’t been a ton going on lately around our house.  Emma has been busy with kindergarten.  She’s doing very well in her class and I would estimate she’s reading at about the second grade level.  She routinely reads 125+ page books and has really enjoyed the Junie B Jones series.  We’ve been trying to go to the library as often as we can and she just loves to pick out a stack of books to bring home.

Emma participated in a dance clinic a couple weeks ago at the high school.  Kids from the local elementary school were able to sign up for the day long event on a Saturday and then they put on a show at the end of the day.  My cousin Brian’s daughter (Lauren) was one of the dance instructors.  I think the event was put on by the high school dance team as a fundraiser.  Emma had a great time there and I’m sure she’ll want to do it again next year.  Her friend, Jena, also participated and she made a couple new friends there too!

We’ve been trying to spend as much time as we can out at the lake.  Since we completed (well, mostly completed) the place it’s been nice to go out there and just relax.  I had a “guys” weekend out there a few weeks back where we played poker etc.  We had 13 people for the poker game (Texas Holdem) which is about the max I think I’d want to have in the game.  It ended up lasting a little over 5 hours.

Katie is enjoying her job and is doing a lot of crocheting when she has the time. Other than that, not too much happening around here.  I was looking for some pictures to post along with this but I realized that we haven’t been taking photos lately.  We bought a video camera (finally) and have been mostly using that.  Here’s a video of Emma singing a song she made up about taking care of the earth.  She’s very in to being a responsible citizen of the earth these days. :)  We took this video last weekend when we were out at the lake:

It’s hard to believe that it’s 2009.  We had a great vacation over Christmas.  We celebrated Christmas eve at our house.  We weren’t sure whether we were even going to get together due to all of the snow.  Unfortunately Brian and Marcia weren’t able to come down but mom and Aunt Jean made it at the last minute.  On Christmas day we went over to Sarah and Dan’s for Christmas breakfast.  They made some delicious food and we all had a nice time.  There were a few presents to open and the kids were happy to get to that as soon as possible.  Dan’s parents were also there and it was nice to visit with them as well.  After we visited there, we went over to mom’s for Christmas lunch/dinner.  The kids all played and had a good time and we stuffed ourselves again.  After that, we went home and took it easy for the evening and then headed out to the lake for a few days.

On New Years Eve we went over to mom’s and celebrated New Years.  Since it’s the anniversary of dad passing away we have a tradition of all getting together.  I think we all had a great time and made it the last hurrah before we all start our New Years resolutions.  On New Years Day I headed out to the cabin to replace mom’s water heater.  I was very glad to get that fixed since there has been no hot water in her cabin for well over a month.  Luckily we have it in our cabin.  Some friends at the lake decided to have a “summer bbq” on Friday afternoon.  It was fun to pretend it was summer.  We had a big bonfire down at the lake (at Tim’s) and the food was delicious.  Okay, I’m starting to see a theme to this post.  There sure are a lot of references to food.  No wonder I’m on a mission to drop some pounds for 2009.

Katie, Emma and Grandma Joan (and Bailey) came out on Friday and we all spent time together at Grandma’s cabin.  They only spent one night before we all headed back home.  Owen and Brooklyn’s birthday party was on Sunday morning at 11 so we thought it would be better to come back on Saturday, rather than rush back Sunday morning.  The party was a lot of fun for the kids.  It was at the Puyallup YMCA and the kids got to play in the gymnastic area.

Unfortunately all the time off has passed and now it’s back to school and work.  We are slowly getting back in the swing of things but it’s hard to go back to work after having a couple weeks off.  Oh well, the grind continues.

Here are a few photos of the last couple weeks:

Here is Ryan doing a few spins on the rings and you can see some of the other kids running on the trampoline type path:

The snow just keeps falling around here.  We’ve easily gotten over 16″ of snow so far.  I’ve been shoveling the driveway and I’m running out of places to throw the snow.  It’s turned out to be a great winter exercise routine……

I’m off until the 5th of January so Emma and I have been hanging out and having fun.  We went over to Grandma Joan’s yesterday and shoveled her driveway so that she can get in and out.  We spent most of the day with her and had a great time.  We all went to Costco, which turned out to be a zoo.  I think everyone has been cooped up around here so they took the opportunity to all go to Costco at the same time.

It continues to snow today, Christmas eve.  While we love the idea of a white Christmas, it is proving to be more challenging logistically speaking.  Mom and Aunt Jean are at mom’s house and aren’t sure whether they are going to try to drive over or not.  Tomorrow we are going to Sarah’s house and then over to mom’s.  The plan was to then go to the cabin after that, although that is in question now due to the snow.  We’ll decide how adventurous we are going to be on Christmas morning.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Emma out in the snow, as well as a couple pictures so that you can see how much snow we have here.

The weather here has been a bit abnormal for the last week or so and that abnormality continued today as it started snowing in the morning and by the end of the day we had about 4 inches of snow.  School was canceled today for Emma so she spent part of the day at Patty’s (friend of ours that runs a daycare next to Emma’s school).  I quit work a little early today and after we got Katie home from work, I went over and got Emma.  After coming home for a bit, I took Emma over to the school where we spent a couple hours sledding down the big hills on the playground.  We had an absolute blast.  A few of Emma’s friends were there as well.

Earlier in the day the kids had made a jump at the bottom of the hill and because I haven’t quite come to terms with my age, I decided to try it out.  I got a good running start, picked up speed down the hill, and went flying off the jump.  The time in the air was really fun.  The landing: not so much.  Needless to say my back and other major parts of my body are in recovery.

Anyway, it was a really fun day today and I think tomorrow will probably be a repeat because the snow doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and I think they have already canceled school.

Ummmmm.  I got lots of good 3’s and 4’s on my report card and my dad is going to type about my very own recipe I made up.

Holiday spice punch:

cinammon

vanilla

nutmeg

cloves

apple juice

Sprite

We put it all in a pouring thing and then we dumped in the spices.  We stirred around a lot and then we added the Sprite at the end.  That’s how the recipe goes.

Okay now I’ll tell you about other stuff.  Movie nights are really fun.  Movie night means that we are going to the school and watching a movie and get some candy and stuff.  Oh, we also got to have popcorn and water.  We drove in the car all the way to my school.  We went in to my school gym and brought money.  I sat on the floor on a blanket and a pillow.  The movie was Wall-E on one night and Kung Fu Panda on the other night.  It was fun.

Nothing else to say now.  I’m going to go eat my bread that I made.  I like it.

I stumbled on to this picture of Emma and Jena after a hard night of Trick or Treating.  We could tell Emma was beat so we called it a night after this photo.