School and other stuff

Well, we finally got another kindergarten teacher on Monday. So Caitlyn's kindergarten class went from having 38 kids to 28...which is only 4 less than when she started at with 32, but it is so much better than 38! The class seems a lot more manageable now.

When we first started kindergarten, they said that the only time that they will be able to do crafts and things is when we, the parents, volunteer. But her class actually has quite a few dedicated moms and grandmothers who go in to help. But I don't think it buys them time for crafts, we usually end up helping the kids who are especially slow, who get absolutely no help at home. They can barely still write their name. They don't know their numbers to 5 or the alphabet. We give them extra help to try to get them up to speed.

In the end, I guess I am okay with that so that at least the other kids in the class will have more of a chance to actually learn something...hopefully.

Today, we were finally able to go in to pick up a copy of the initial police report. Now we have to make copies, fill out paperwork and write letters to all the companies to try to clean up all the credit fraud problems. Fun times...

On the brighter side, I have also finally gotten my act together (and enough time) to start volunteering for the FamilySearch indexing project. I've been wanting to do it since the beginning of the year but never quite got around to it. I had some problems getting started and ended up spending about an hour on the phone plus several e-mails trying to get started but due to some small glitch somewhere, it wasn't letting me on. We finally got it cleared up and it's been strangely rewarding and frustrating at the same time. It boggles the mind how historical documents were allowed to be written out with inky, smudgy pens in sloppy cursive that someone else is supposed to be able to decipher. They should have at least been forced to print!

I Fell Down and I Can't Get Up...

We've been helping a friend paint their new house the past couple of weekends. Saturday I fell off a small ladder, got a mild concussion, some soft tissue damage in one elbow and some scrapes and bruises. But luckily no dain bramage.

I'm too old for this.

Mid-Autumn Festival

A friend recommended the Chinese Moon Festival at the Heritage House. We've never gone to it so we thought we would take the girls and check it out. It was a bit crowded but we still had a good time. They had a lot of booths for crafts and things. The girls got to make Chinese lanterns and scrolls. Because there were so many people, they didn't have time to do every one of them. They learned to use chopsticks. There was a lady demonstrating how to play the guzheng. She was letting people play it but the girls were too shy to try.

There was also a lion dance (although, they called it a dragon dance, I don't think that that was technically correct) which was kind of fun to watch.

I wanted to get a couple of moon cakes to take home so the girls could try them but like I said, it was very crowded and we ran out of time for everything. They also had a high powered telescope to view the full moon but we didn't want to wait in line for it.

The full harvest moon was technically yesterday though. Traditionally, it is the time where families reunite and give thanks. I guess it would be seen as the Chinese Thanksgiving day. Even though my family is not that far away, it is too troublesome to drive home in the middle of the week just to have dinner with the family through all the traffic. Plus the kids have school still tomorrow.

Birthday

We basically celebrated my birthday early this year when Christian took the day off last Thursday so that we can spend the day together so today was like most other days. I did take the day off from volunteering at school and stuff though and had a nice peaceful day on my own.

Christian offered to take us out to dinner in the evening but I considered the cost of going out to eat again and decided to take some of that money instead to buy us a nice piece of Wild Alaskan Salmon from Costco for dinner instead. Christian came home early to help me with dinner and did all the dishes afterwards (hooray).

I forgot to mention in my previous post though that my birthday present from Marian was a ticket to see one of the last performances of Phantom of the Opera. Apparently, after 21 years and over 10,000 performances, they are finally done. I never did get to see it before, so I am really excited. Christian has seen it before but he's getting a ticket too for his early birthday present!

I also got some fun Bed Bath & Beyond dollars to fix up my bedroom a bit more of how I would like it to be. I haven't gone on my shopping spree yet. I'm still trying to decide what I want to do.

Busy nothings

I've been really bad lately about updating my blog so I'm forcing myself to make some posts so that I can record what has been going on. And I'm going to cheat and backdate them!

Last week, our friend Marian had to take off on a business trip, so we dog sat for her. She has two dogs. Christian set up some temporary fencing for them on the side of the house. Emily was so excited. She couldn't wait for the dogs to get here.

She loved to take them for walks. I had some severe allergic reactions when we went out. I don't know if it was the dogs or something in the air at the time. I've developed allergies since I started having kids and I still have not figured out what the heck I am allergic to.

I seem to be falling apart anyway. I haven't had a day of health since the beginning of July for one reason or another it seems and I'm pretty tired of it all.

I had a check up at the beginning of the year and my doctor keeps yelling at me about my cholesterol level (again). So I figured that I needed to do something about it before she puts me on some kind of medication. I decided that I was going to get in shape. I had gained a bunch of weight and have been pretty unhappy about it. Of course, we hummed and hawed about it for a couple of months before we got moving. We started with going for a jog at the base of the mountains once a week. We were pretty out of shape. We managed to start losing a few pounds but then school ended and summer started so it got a little more difficult to exercise with the kids and the heat.

But in June, while we were having having dinner with Marian, she got us to enter into this contest to lose some weight. I entered very reluctantly as I didn't see much hope. Plus I gained back a couple of pounds just eating at her house that night! But we continued with our exercise (although, still sparse) and we managed to lose a couple more pounds. After I got sick and lost my appetite for a while, I thought that it would be a great time to readjust the size of my meals when my appetite returned. That actually seemed to do the most good and I lost a few more pounds and then a few more.

Basically, I reached my goal weight by the beginning of August. Part of the terms of the contest was to keep the weight off for a month. Long story short, I won the contest! My incentive, a day off!

So, when Marian came to pick up her dogs, she came early so that she could be here to pick up the girls from school and watch them while Christian and I got to take the day off on our own. We took off Newport Beach after getting the kids off to school. We tried to go early so that we can make it to the 10:am session at the Newport Temple but as we ran into too much traffic, we were short of about 10 minutes.

We decided to visit a friend in Tustin until the next session. Luckily she was home and we were able to visit with Raena, whom we have not seen in a while. That was fun. In fact, it was the highlight of our day. After we left her house, we went to the Temple. There was at least an hour before the next session so we thought that we would have time to walk the grounds and stuff. We checked in to make sure that we could get in since the internet said that we should not need an appointment. Unfortunately, there was a stake getting ready for their stake conference that day and the session was booked. But some of the workers said that people never all show up so it would be fairly certain that we would still be able to get in since we were there early. At one point, there was even talk about them making us the witness couple but then they just forgot about us. The session started (it was not full) and we just sat there like idiots waiting. There were some other incidents that made us feel less that welcomed at the temple and we ended up just walking out in a huff. The worst Temple experience ever (Yes, worse than the last time I went to the Temple and we were attempting to take some newly baptized members to do baptisms but was turned away because of some misunderstandings, miscommunication and bureaucratic rules. Members who are all now struggling with their membership, I might add).

Anyway, we tried to salvage the day. Christian took me to lunch at the Crab Cooker for my birthday. It wasn't quite as we remembered it and could not quite enjoy ourselves anyway.

We headed home in the late afternoon. Marian got the girls to get their homework done and got a bunch of tasty things for an early birthday dinner. Christian helped prepare dinner which was cioppino and cheesecake for dessert! I also got to end the night with a candlelit bath.

Of course, Christian ended up having to take extra time off again the next day still so that we could go back to the Redlands Temple to try to erase the bad experiences I have had as of late. 

Perks of home ownership...

Us:  We need to report that we have become victims of identity theft.
Police:  Have you lost your IDs or bought a new home recently?

This is how we spent our Tuesday. Countless hours on the phone with credit reporting agencies, credit card companies and department stores where credit has been issued in our name without our permission. Between Christian and I, apparently they have racked up roughly $10,000 worth of ill gotten goods from all over the Inland Empire.

The shopping spree started on the 9th of this month. Late Monday, we got a strange set of letters from Sears saying that our applications for credit was denied due to too many inquiries into our credit. We both got two letters each from Sears. That was really puzzling to us but we didn't think too much of it initially. Some kind of mix up maybe? A bad marketing scam? I've gotten that before from a magazine telling me to pay up for a subscription that I never ordered.

After we got the kids off to school, I started calling around to find out what was going on. We started to take it more seriously and logged on to get an instant credit report from Experian. We found all kinds of recent credit racked up to stores we definitely do not have credit cards from or some places we don't even shop at. They've been at it for 5 days. Apparently, they have our names, addresses, social security numbers and fake identifications. Some stores we found were more forthcoming than others in helping us find out what was going on. A lot of them seemed to be protecting the people stealing their products and damaging our good credit and names.

It's been a nightmare. After a day of Christian missing work, me ditching the school (since I had planned to help in Caitlyn's class that day), hours on the phone and running all over town we think we have put the fires out and that they will not be able to get anything more from us but it's hard to say and our nightmare has really just begun as now we need to work on repairing the damage done.

The police say that it is very common and easy for people to steal your identity after buying a house because of all the information distributed with all the paperwork you do. We were extra paranoid about it too...refusing to e-mail confidential information, shredding and burning extra or initial copies of paper work. But the industry is filled with opportunistic shady characters and you can only do so much to try to protect yourself when they are bent on robbing you. You can't go and hide in some cave. You want a house...something to call your own and provide some security for your family.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, identity theft will soon replace drug trafficking as the Number One crime in the nation. Have any of you bought a house recently?

By the way, we had to pay for parking to file a report at the police station and we will have to go back in 10 working days to pay for a copy of the police report...talk about adding insult to injury.

Labor Day and other matters

Well, we seem to be settling into our new schedule okay. I've had to reduce the amount of time I volunteer in Caitlyn's kindergarten class or I would have to spend $65 to get finger printed and get TB tests just so that I can help out. The class has 36 kids in it now. It is a little bit less crazy in there as the rest of the kids are getting down the rules but you can't expect too much with 36 5-year-old kids. Luckily, there are a lot dedicated mothers in there who volunteer as well. Supposedly, they have gotten approval to get another kindergarten teacher so that should bring a little more sanity into the classes. We don't know how long it will take to get the teacher in there though.

Unfortunately, we don't qualify for reduced lunch this year. I can't for the life of me, figure out why. The cost of living has gone up. We have not gotten any cost of living increases. We will probably make less this year because of the furloughs and yet, we no longer qualify to get hot lunches for the kids. Packing lunch for the kids really stresses me out. In kindergarten, I had a rough time getting Emily to eat sandwiches. In fact, the yard supervisor informed us that she was throwing away her food. Nice.

Both kids are in school full days now so if they don't eat their lunch, the are going to starve. So you would expect that after starving a couple of times, that they would learn but then you underestimate the shear stubbornness of my kids. I'm actually not as concerned with Caitlyn. She actually enjoys eating sandwiches...especially if I put lettuce in them.

We had a few things we needed to do on Labor Day weekend so we didn't really get to go do anything fun. Besides, in our past experience, it isn't really worth while to travel on Labor Day weekend. It is just way to dangerous. Emily asked us what Labor Day was about. We told her that it was a day we had to labor...she seemed to accept that and so we put the kids to work in the yard. Besides, I think it has been what we seem to end up doing every Labor Day for at least the past few years.

The kids are usually pretty excited to get a job in the garden to earn otter-pops.

Emily is finally re-growing all the baby teeth she lost in the front of her mouth over the summer.

Caitlyn learned to tie her shoes! We were pretty excited about that.