Disneyland Family Fun

On Tuesday we spent the whole day in Disneyland and around noon we were joined by our cousins, aunt, uncle, nieces and nephew. And in the the evening we were joined by papa and yaya. It was a great day...quite long for me because I did not get a decent nights sleep the night before. However, we lived to talk about it :o) Gabriela Zoe thoroughly enjoyed Disneyland and it is so fun to see her understanding more and more. When it was nap time she would not go to sleep, and Stephen and I kept telling her that we would still be in Dland when she woke up. Well eventually she was convinced and allowed herself to sleep for an hour. On of the highlights is that she got to shake Mary Poppins hand and take a picture with her. She was in AWE!!! I would say that she is her favorite 'princess' at the moment :o)

Boundaries

As I am writing this I can hear GZ playing in her room! I consider myself a babywise mom even though I do not follow everything to the T and maybe some other babywise moms would not think that I am :o) However, I understand the principle behind the method and as I understand it is : 'The parents makes the shots and not the baby/toddler/kid' I do have to keep going back and be reminded of some specific ways to make that applicable. Like I said I don't follow everything and I cannot be 'blamed' for having read the book cover to cover several times...but i have leafed through it multiple times for specific issues. I was reading the blog Chronicles of a Babywise Mom and I found a lot of similarities in the approach I took in potty training my daughter. For one thing I don't expect my 18 month old at the time to tell me when she needs to go to the bathroom I take her (learned that the hard way :o) every 30 min. then 45 etc and now she can go for longer periods of time without needing to use the restroom and almost always is able to ask before the issue is urgent to the NOW!
As I was reading through her blog I came to face with this reality, one thing that I have not been consistent with in the past is alone playtime. I have not been against it, but maybe I got a little lazy in training my daughter to be able to do that. After I read that blog I was thinking through the idea of alone playtime. The reason why it is important is to teach the child to be able to entertain herself. In parenthesis let me add that in my specific circumstance that is not a problem. GZ has always been able to occupy herself when I can't give her face to face time. This may be the reason why I did not push 'alone playtime' However, this last week I realized there is another even more important purpose and that is the teaching of boundaries. I thought about when she is a teenager and she wants to do something that I do not allow or I need her to do something, I believes it goes beyond the understanding of parent/child relationship to the built in frame of mind that the parent is the one that sets the boundaries of what is allowable and what is not and for how long etc. Yes if that boundary is set by the parent from the time the child is young the battle agains boundaries set in the future I believe will be at least more mild. And yes my daughter is about 11 years away from even beginning to be a teenager so I have a lot to learn still. However, this is what I believe is a glimpse of the future in light of what I am doing NOW as a parent. My part is to pray and seek God fervently, read/seek/ask for advice and the outcome is up to God.

Again???

Yes again regarding discipline :o) I just finished watching Supernanny, the episode before the last one... http://abc.go.com/watch/supernanny/153459/240535/phelps-family#sl-0 (if you are not residing in the U.S. you will not be able to watch it...sorry not my rules)
I think it was a great episode that touched on some very important issues in the family unit. In fact I had never spent too much time on watching the show before, but my mom suggested that I watch it, and it has given me some great ideas on parenting.
Understanding the premise of the show I know they go to families that are facing some problems, I also understand that the show does not condone 'spanking' as a valid form of discipline. However, it is unfortunate that what parents saw nationwide...and probably will see eventually internationally was a bad model on spanking.
If you watch the show the testimonial of the mother (who was the most avid advocate in the family for spanking) at the end said "I learned that I can discipline without losing my temper and getting angry" (a loose quote) Well then that means that she was not using spanking properly as a discipline tool.
One of our pastors in his teaching on discipline cautions the parents "Do Not spank when you are angry" Spanking is not a way to vent your anger...what is unfortunate that what people see most often is parents acting out of anger and spanking gets a bad rep.
I cannot tell you exactly in what circumstances I will spank my child, and that's because it is not set on stone, however, as her understanding grows I use time-out more often and spanking less. Really that is the goal...after a certain time the child should not need to be spanked any more.
Another statement in the show that made my head turn a little sideways :o) The dad said "if there is a way to teach my children without causing them pain I want that way. Any loving parent would prefer it that way" Can I just say that when I spank my daughter my hand feels it too and what feels it even more is my heart. I do not get any satisfaction out of spanking my daughter, in fact my heart hurts that it had to come down to that. When I am finished spanking I just hold her and let her cry and when she is done crying I kiss her and she gives me a hug because she knows how much I love her. May I add to that also that in life the wrong choices we make hurt...they hurt us and they hurt others too. I just hope in the quest of teaching my child right from wrong, cause and effect, that somehow she will learn, that she will gain wisdom and lose foolishness and just maybe she, like me, one day will be grateful for her parent's steadfastness in teaching her those things. God bless you and goodnight :o)

Weekend

I always feel like I have to update our family happenings and I always find myself not having time to upload pictures or not feeling like writting. I guess now because of smilebox I uploaded a bunch of pictures and now I feel like writing :o) what are the odds?
We decided that Saturday was going to be an 'in' day...in our home we have a constant 'struggle' should we call it with 'in' and 'out'. Stephen works very hard all week long and gets to sepnd only 4 hours max in our home every day...that is awake hours. So he really craves to be home. I on the other hand I spend maybe about the same time outside of the home as he does in...so I want to go out :o) We have learned to plan it so that we are both satisfied. Back to Saturday being an 'in' day...that meant we kinda did nothing :o) Stephen and the baby took a nap, we had all our meals together and had a late run to costco. So that is how our exciting Saturday went :o)
On Sunday I serve with the nursery at the 9a.m. service...I am a mini worship leader! I just started and it is so much fun to do what I do with GZ with the other kids too. I'm also sort of a backup teacher...if a class has too many kids and not enought volunteers I go to keep the ratio good :o) It is not often needed because our church is so rich with all the people who are sooo willing to serve in everyway they can.
We did get home a little later than usual and after sitting down for a few brief moments we started getting ready for our Fireproof group. The topic was forgiveness and I think that all of us were overwhelmed at how God loves us and forgives us. Moreover, how we fall short so many times in the forgiving part...It is only throught God's grace that we can forgive the way that He does!! One of our groupees was talking how easy it is to forgive their own children because they are childres...they don't understand what they are doing and the consequences of their actions. When that person said that it lighted a light in my head in relation to the verse he had read earlier. (While Jesus was crucified he cried out) "forgive them for they do not know what they do" Really that is how God see us...as His children (duh) and He knows that we don't understand everything and that's how He wants us to view other people that try to hurt us. They really do not understand the consequences of their actions and the words that the speak. It really sheds a new light, for me, into the "see people as God sees them".
I cannot give a full view of that night if I do not include the craziness of three children under the age of four going wild and trying to have a discussion over their noises and our insane laughter of sharing stories that only portray the true struggles pretty much every new nuclear family faces...the comic twist was just awesome :o)
So today is Monday! We will be partially atteniding the Autumn Leadership Conference...since there is no childcare we cannot really dive into it like in the past :o) But I am looking forward to the great things God has in store for us as we invite the Holy Spirit to instruct and guide us! Warning: you many not hear an update on this since I'm a slow processor and watch and see and wait kind of approach to life :o) But I'm sure that as some point what I share with have been impacted by the next few days!
For now I'm home...enjoying time to myself while Stephen took GZ for a little bit of work and our bi-yearly cleaning of our rings....since on Thursday is going to be our FIVE year anniversary since we got engaged! So long...I'm going to take a nap now :o)

At The Huntington

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Pumpkin Patch

Make a Smilebox photobook

Pictures

These pictures go with the post below :o) when our computer died there were a whole bunch of pictures that I had not transfered to the external and they were lost so I had to use the ones I've already used for FB I had some more I was saving for the post but oh well :o) Praise God I did have some pics from the things we did and they are not completely lost forever! Enjoy

Ifigeneia

Well I hope she gets a tickle for being in the title line. Because I'm so far behind in updating our whereabouts this would be the next 'big' happening after the bathroom was that our friend from Greece came to visit for 10 days. While she wss here we did touristy things among which were 3 days at Disneyland. Well we did not stay in Anaheim so we kept going back and forth only staying for a max of 6 hours! We still were super exhausted by the end of the third day! The first day Stephen was with us so we managed to do all the grown up rides that she wanted to do even though...it was insanely busy. The other two days Ifigeneia had her firsts as well as some of her favs...and there were some new ones for us. For one Casey Jr. Circus train...I had no idea that that train existed! and GZ was positively awed by the awesomeness lol :o)
We also went to the Getty Villa on a Saturday taking a new awesome, closer, better route....I'm not telling I don't want to congest it :o) Even though it was a hot day the villa being situated by the beach and architectually designed to function without an A/C (well at least some of it)...I think that deserves a God bless the Greeks (it was Roman yes but they took it from the Greeks)...it was a breezy beautiful afternnon spent museuming :o) They have great things for kids...the first think we did is we pretended to be merchants of fabric, from some place in Greece, and traded lots of pounds of material for a little bit of olive oil. The olive oil we mock made it ourselves...they put a few olives in a grinding thing and I beat them to the death and got 3 drops of olive oil...extra virgin I might add ;o) the first and best press. Well then we took our oil and 'traded' it for perfume. Well we had to make our own perfume so we got to keep the oil, so we crushed herbs that we chose (lavender was one of them) and them we mixed it with the oil. Then we took our perfume and traded it for gold, (we got to keep the perfume...our gift from the Getty) we got to engrave a gold leaf and then attached it to a plastic thing and made a necklace out of it. My coin inscribed....Victory with a victory wreath, Athens 10 drachma (all of that was in Greek)f....so I'm a little hurt for not getting the medal for the best coin around....I'll get over it :o) We also got to draw on clay pots, and draw realistic figurines and got to play with our shadows. I highlly recoment the Getty if you have children and like beautiful gardens and balconies...now if you like archeology they have that too :o) If fact they have the only gold jewelry that I've ever liked! Too bad they are almost priceless and of coarse I would not dare to walk around the street with that stuff on my head, neck, nose, hands, ears....Oh yeah I also like the way the homes were made with the rain falling in the midle of the house gathering in a pool to be used for household uses and gardens in another middle of the house with luscious landscaping, irresistable smells and relaxing sounds of the fountains. Of coarse even if I was a billioner I could probably not afford a house like that so its just tucked aways for dreaming :o)
The rest of our time was spent with every day stuff like having a friend over for dinner (including the cooking and cleaning it ensues :o) pool time and running errands, going to church and even visiting a new church and playing games. We are thankful that we had the opportunity to have Ifigeneia at our home...it is always a welcomed treat.
So I just had a thought...a thought of the present :o) GZ was just sitting next to me as we are watching her favorite video 'Shamu"...I held her hand and thought how blessed I am to be her mom and what a wonderful gift she is to us :o)

A new Bathroom

Stephen has been slowly tearing the bathroom...slowly... for almost two years now but a few months ago he got serious about tearing out! The day after Jodi's wedding he started the serious stuff! We had to hir a man from church who knew what he was doing...but because Stephen was involved with the whole process it cost us a lot less that it would have to get a beautiful bathroom like the have we have now :o) I thank my handy man for working so hard to make this dream a reality and for the Lord providing so richly :o)

Dan and Jodi's Wedding!!!

September 26th was the day of my sister's wedding...and my new brother's :o) It was a beautiful wedding from preparation to sending off :o) Everyone at some point got teary eyed looking at Jodi or the two of them....they both waited to find the right person and got brought them together miraculously. God is faithful to those that trust Him even though His timing does not always make sense to us.
The ceremony started with the walking down of the family members, but what was different was that each bridesmaid walked down with one flower princess (except for one that had two :o)) so I got to walked with my very own flower princess :o) To add to the excitement we were met at the front by our 'men'...for some of us it really was our men...and we stood together on the same side as opposed to the traditional M-F split. Jodi and Dad walked down the aisle with the song 'My girl'...so cute and playful...just like who Jodi is. At some point of the wedding the whole family was invited to stand with them and pray over them, and Stephen was asked to voice our prayers.
The reception was great with a live band from our parent's church so we danced and let loose :o) It was fun...as much as I can attest for myself.
The send-off was inspired by their first date and engagement, they got squirted with blue squirt guns (emulating the sprinklers)...some person did something that I think was foolish and dumped a bucket of water on them...however, I am pretty sure that in retrospect that has added a little unexpected fun in the memories of Jodi and Dan...and she was not wearing her dress...in case you were wondering :o)

Make over

Since we could not be with Jodi for the manicure and pedicure time we decided to go somewhere close and get it done...as well as we signed up for a free make over at the Estee Lauder booth. My person was all talk but he did not once listen what I wanted so in the end it looked like the way I got there...no makeup. My sister's gal did a great great job! It was VL's also first time ever of getting her nails done and the place we went was a worthy first experience. We were pampered to the max and our DDGZ had fun watching everyone 'spoil' us...she was a good sport I can complain :o)

Aquarium of the Pacific

It is a well known fact that I like amusement parks but I also really enjoy nature and aquariums!!! One of the last activities we did when VL was here was visit the Aquarium of the Pacific. It is true that it is not very big but because of the places where you can touch the sea creatures....if it was not as hot as it was we could have been out there for HOURS!!!! I found out that aquariums are even more fun with little kids!!! :o)

Dodger Game

As you see Nikki also joined us for the Dodger game!!! It was fun to be able to see her one more time :o) Our cousin was able to come too and his friend so we were a good sized group! It was also an exciting game...our team won and the game lasted for 3+ hours unlike last years game...maybe God was having mercy on us last year because our baby was so little :o) Our DDGZ utterly enjoyed watching the game, the excited fans the yelling and dancing...as well all of our attentions :o) Next year again!