Happy Birthday Camille!!

Doesn't she Look so grown up!

This December Camille turned 3!!
Friends Carver and Zane, cousins Tori and Tommy, as well as, Grandma and Papa T. came over for the party!
We celebrated with some Tinkerbell cupcakes and opened presents.

It was a great time!!

Baby J. Joins the Adventure!!

Ok, here he is! The newest member of our family!

He is about 3 1/2 months old, and is so sweet!

For now we will call him Baby J. on the blog, but will let you know his full name soon! We are all so excited to have him as a son, and brother!

Aidan's Fall Concert

Last night was Aidan's fall concert. He plays the trombone for both the 7 & 8th grade Concert Band, as well as, the schools Jazz Band. He really loves it, and sounds great!! These are the new band t-shirts.
The picture below is the Jazz Band. Aidan gets to school an hour early three days a week for practice. This means he walks in the dark during the winter! I'm sure he will tell his kids how mean we were not to drive him all the time (and about the snow and it's uphill both ways!!)It is fun to see him find something he loves doing!

We are very proud of him!!

Hopewalks and the Pumpkin Farm!!

This past Saturday we participated again in HOPEWALKS: A Promise to the Children of the Epidemic. We walked to raise funds for children and families affected by AIDS, poverty and child slavery. The money raised goes to organizations that are meeting physical needs, as well as, reaching these kids and families with the love of Jesus. It was an awesome opportunity serve others as a family. It is also exciting that what we did Saturday will make an impact on the other side of the world!

Aidan isn't in our pictures because he was part of the event volunteer team.
Isaac had a great ride! Camille rode in the stroller part of the way, and also walked some. It would have been to slow for her to walk the entire way(she tends to stop to look at everything!!).
After HOPEWALKS, we went to a local flower farm, nursery and pumpkin farm. It was a very beautiful location in the foothills.

We rode on a hayride!

The hayride stopped at the chicken coop. The kids got to see the orange Halloween eggs the chickens have been laying!
Aidan & Elise! (Yes, he is that much taller than she is!) Isaac and Camille had fun choosing pumpkins!
We had a lot of help getting the pumpkins to the truck!

BANGS!!

OK, I will be the first to admit that the bangs are cute!

I just really liked her hair before. Before she took scissors and cut it herself! We are lucky, it was a pretty easy fix. We are also lucky that I was standing almost next to her when she did it, so I was able to stop her before she did even more damage! There is a section in the toward the middle of her head that is about an inch long, but I think it will all grow out just fine.

Isaac's Birthday!!

Isaac had his 4th birthday party this week! It is amazing how quickly he is growing up! He chose to have a dinosaur party, and picked out the decorations himself! We had the party in the evening and invited just a few friends. We had pizza and chips for the kids, while the adults had grilled salmon on crackers with cream cheese, capers and pimentos. Delicious!!We played "Pin the Skull on the Fossil". Isaac's skull was the closest, but he also peaked a little!
This year was a Star Wars year. He got Star Wars PJ's, a shirt, action figures and a light saber(is that right?). He was thrilled with this because Brian took him to see the new Star Wars Clone Wars movie and he LOVED it! (Oh the things you get to do when you have older siblings!)
Isaac also picked out his cake at the store. He loves dinosaurs, so this was perfect! I didn't realize until after he blew out the candles that the dinosaurs on the cake light up and roar. That would have been really fun! The candles spelled his name, which I had never seen before.

What a perfect cake for Isaac!

Here is the big wheel that Grandma and Papa K. gave him. He has already had a lot of fun speeding around in the backyard!
In the end, it was a fantastic evening. We enjoyed our friends, and Isaac enjoyed his. I think he felt very special and loved by everyone!

A Garden Update!

Let me start by saying that we have not been trying to neglect the family blog. We also have not stopped going on adventures. We did, however, forget to take our camera on our camping trip to Bandon,Oregon. This was such a disappointment when we realized what we had done! We did buy disposable cameras and handed them out to each of the kids. We got cd's of the pictures, so I will figure out how to post them soon. Also, Brian had a great time fishing in Alaska! I am trying to get him to blog about it, but he has been busy. We will get to those projects soon!

For now here are some pictures from our garden. This spider has been living in the top of our tomato plants all summer. We have been watching him, amazed, for at least a month now. It is the largest spider I have ever seen in my own yard, at least 2full inches. I am so glad he has chosen the top of the plant to spin his web and live, because I like knowing exactly where he is... before I reach in to grab tomatoes! Brian and the kids have fed it by catching insects to put in its web. What a daddy thing to do!!

This is just a cool picture of one of the many helpful insects in our garden!
Here is Isaac with our crop of red onions. This isn't all of them, because we have been raiding the garden to eat them!
This is the sifter Brian made earlier when we made the raised beds. It is now converted to a drying rack for the onions. The kids really love helping with all of this!
Soon we will post pictures of our new fall plantings. We have started lettuces, carrots, Swiss chard, broccoli, with more on the way!

Camille's First Fish!!

Camille caught her first fish! We took the boat out to a new spot on the delta, and Camille got lucky! Not only was this the first fish of the day, it was her first fish ever!!!

Brian was very patient as he held the pole and Camille wound in the fish!


Of course she had to touch it!!
Elise caught the biggest fish of the day!
The kids named it Carl even though we decided to keep this one to grill for dinner. When we got home and Brian got the fish out to clean, Isaac happily asked if it was Carl. I guess they are OK with eating things they have named!

Isaac also caught a fish! We had such a great time!
Aidan won the prize for the smallest fish of the day!!

The kids just to love to fish, as long as we catch something!

Aidan is always so helpful!
Here he is helping Camille wind in another catch.

Another successful day on the water.

After fishing the kids went for a swim.

What a perfect day!!

4th of July in Berkeley, CA

This 4th of July we decided to get out of the heat and go have some fun. We looked online for things to do, and found a festival at the Berkeley Marina. Brian fishes out of this marina and we love to walk on the pier there, so we made reservations at the Double Tree Inn for a couple of nights. Our room overlooked a bike path, the Marina and the boats. We had a balcony where we spent a lot of time people watching, boat dreaming and waving at the dragon boat (the local dragon boat club was offering free rides at the festival and we were on the route)! The festival was fun. The kids did several blow-up jump house activities, we walked alot, and ate fun food! We had Tibetan Momo (which is like dim sum), actual dim sum, knishes, and El Salvadorian stuffed corn cakes. It was all delicious!!

During the afternoon, we also went to the Adventure Playground at the Marina. It is a creative "sandlot" type of place. We decided that it was the most scary, dangerous, exciting and fun place we have ever let the kids play. The playground is ever-changing as kids use hammers, nails and paint to transform it daily.

Camille had fun climbing on the rope web!Elise and Isaac are on one of the many ships at the playground!Daddy and Camille are on a look-out tower!What a crazy slide!!I was very proud to see Elise do the trolley, she is so brave sometimes! Aidan didn't want to do it with her, so she did it alone. SHE HAD A BLAST!!

(and did it about a dozen times!!)Isaac had fun hammering real nails with a real hammer! This is something we just don't get out to play with at home. On Saturday we went to the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland. We have never been there before, and it was a great museum!
Camille and daddy!
Isaac and Camille flying in a space capsule!!

We all took turns looking through a telescope!
Isaac doing a space puzzle!
Learning about the effects of wind on a comet's tail(or something like that!) I think they just had fun blowing on small pieces of dry ice!!
Camille and I went into the Discovery Lab while everyone else went to planetarium. It was a hands on activity center for younger kids.

She looked at rocks, bones and shells with a magnifying glass.
She also pretended to be an astronaut and flew in a space ship!
On Sunday before we went home, we HAD to go to the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. It is the kids' favorite museum of all time!! We had a great time as always! And, the view is always so amazing!

Isaac and Camille in a mirrored triangle! We almost lost Isaac in the blocks!
Aidan and Isaac raced boats propelled by rubber bands!Elise working on math skills during the summer (her teachers would be so proud)!
Aidan and Brian had so much fun using dams to divert the water flow at the pond.

You never get too old to play in the water!!Elise and Isaac experiencing first hand the shifting of tectonic plates!On the whale in front of the museum.We had so much fun on our trip! We look forward to doing it again next year!