Early Easter egg hunt and other matters

On Friday, we had a couple of guests over for dinner and as they did not leave until late, we did not bother with the dishes that night. We left the next morning, immediately after breakfast to visit with my family for Ching Ming.

We did not return until the late afternoon. I finally decided to tackle the dish pile at this point and I was very nearly through when the handle on my kitchen faucet abruptly broke off! I fed the kids some dinner. Christian finished up washing my car (since he was in the middle of doing so when the faucet broke).

He took the faucet apart, hoping that we would be able to find a part to fix the problem and we headed out to the stores in search of the little plastic part that apparently held the heavy duty metal handle down to turn the faucet on and off. We went to both Lowes and Home Depot but was not able to find the part  or anything like it. We had to face the fact that we had to buy a whole new faucet. We actually went to three stores and finally decided upon a faucet. It was late and we had to put the kids to bed. By the time we got the faucet out, we found that the new faucet that we just bought, would not fit our supply lines because we had to move the pipes when we had to repipe the house. We now needed either another faucet or some very expensive couplers in order to fit the faucet with the extended supply lines. We had an old faucet from another sink in the backyard that we were planning on using for a potting bench. We took that apart and tried to install it, but found out that it was cracked and leaked, so we were out of luck. It was way after midnight at this point.

We have church early in the morning on Sunday. Christian had to be up again for meetings even earlier in the morning. When we came home, we were expecting Auntie Marian for another dinner, but we had no faucet to do dishes or even wash our hands when preparing the meal. We had to keep running to the bathroom to wash our hands. I'll tell you, it's a lot more difficult than you would even imagine.

Auntie Marian came over to bring Emily's belated birthday gifts, an early birthday gift for Cailtyn and to do her annual Easter egg hunt with the girls since she will be working next weekend.

The girls also got beautiful matching dresses from Marian. They got money, Ghirardelli and Lindt chocolates in their eggs...what a bunch of spoiled kids! We had a late lunch/early dinner with Marian since she came in between and had to leave early to go home to rest before getting up early again for work.

As you can imagine, the dishes were piled every where by the end of the night again.

Monday morning, after we got the kids off to school. Christian and I went back out to figure out what to do about our faucet problems. Almost all the new faucets would require us to get expensive fittings in order to fit them to the extended supply lines so I had to re-evaluate my choice of faucets and ended up picking up a cheaper faucet because of the added costs of the fittings. I finally got a working faucet back in my kitchen by Monday afternoon. Christian ended up just taking the day off since we spent most of the day, trying to figure out what to do. I really don't like doing the dishes, but it was so nice to have a working faucet again in my kitchen. After two huge loads of dishes, I was almost done, when I had to make more dishes because it was time to start dinner! It's an endless cycle!

Awards

The end of the 2nd trimester was on Friday, so we got the girls' report cards. This week they had the award ceremonies for those who earned awards.

Emily had hers on Monday afternoon. She got honor roll, perfect attendance and citizenship again. She is actually 2 areas away from getting high honors! They have been doing a lot of creative writing lately and Emily just doesn't like it. She doesn't like to write and she won't put very much effort into it. She still has some trouble with exercising her imagination (although, she is a lot better than she used to be).

She also got some extra awards for getting advanced scores on her CSTs last year and also for STAR reading. They are really trying to get the school out of PI and since they made a 16 point gain last year, I think that they are really close, so whatever they can do to entice the kids to do better, they are definitely doing it.

Caitlyn had her award ceremony this morning. She got high honors and citizenship. She missed perfect attendance by that one fated Valentine's day.

The second graders have not taken the CST yet so they did not get the extra awards for that. They will be taking it later on this year.

The girls do well and get lots of awards every year and so it seems so easy for them, but it is a constant battle because they want to be lazy and they don't want to do their homework most of the time. It is exhausting trying to keep them on track. They seem to do well on their own while at school but by the time they get home, they are burnt out or something because they act like a bunch of lazy spoiled, undisciplined brats...which is weird because I am so much more strict with them than any one else. I have tried being really on top of them and making sure they get their work done. I have tried just leaving them alone and letting them take on the responsibility themselves. Most of the time it ends up to be almost the same...only sometimes if I leave them alone, they don't get hardly anything done at all.

If they finish, they can go outside to play, play video games, watch t.v./movies. If they don't get their work done, they get nothing. They seem fine with that most of the time. They rather just giggle like a bunch of potheads while rolling around in their own filth. I don't understand it and am at my wits end. I may actually look forward to summer this year...well, almost.

Tribulation

UCR's Heat Concert was on the day of Emily's birthday party. Music was blasting through our part of the city all day and into the night. It got considerably louder as the night wore on. We finally called the police at 11:30 in the evening as our windows, the dishes on our counter (and our nerves) rattled with the booming of the music. They said that they couldn't do anything about it and that we had to contact the UCR police. We contacted them and they said that there was nothing that they could do about it and that if we had a "complaint," we had to take it up with Vice Chancellor Jim Sandoval (who by the way, doesn't have to live with the consequences of the Heat as he lives safely tucked away in his quiet neighborhood in Orange County).  

The concert finally ended just after midnight but various after parties broke out throughout the neighborhoods. Christian had to be up by 5:30 for meetings. I had to turn on some white noise so that the kids could get some sleep. But nearly just as bad as the concert itself is the lack of concern and sympathy we got from people because it really didn't bother them that much (and that is all that really matters, right?)...well, they figured it was just one day out of the year. I mean, who cares that there is utter lawlessness as long as it is only for one day...well, until they decide that they want a concert in the summer as well and hey, wouldn't it be nice to have a big concert in the fall as well to welcome the students back to school? 

Apparently, the city's noise ordinances doesn't apply to the school because they are a "state" entity.  The concert has drawn criticism for years. The outcome, well, they ended the concert this year at midnight instead of 1:am like last year. We should all be thankful and shut our mouths, right? Although, they stuck it to us because I think it was overall louder than last year.

We live miles from campus and it sounded like a huge party one block over. That is just out of control. I spent all morning on Monday writing letters to the Chancellor, Mayor and our city Councilman. A few of our neighbors wrote as well. None of us got any kind of satisfactory reply. We got some courtesy notes from our councilman's office but the University has been utterly silent.

They noted our "positions" and invited us to some neighborhood association meeting next week.
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We also found out on Tuesday that someone hijacked our credit card in Florida. They changed our address and bought around $800 of swag before we were able to cancel it. We had a difficult time changing our information back to the original information that we set up the account with and wondered how on earth they managed to actually change it! Apparently, they have Christians SS#.
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I found out this morning the results of the 6th grade lottery for the STEM Academy. Basically, a third of the students has to drop out of the program, move or get "bridged" out and more than half of the students on the waiting list before us has to decline in order for us to even have a chance of attending. The chances of that are slim to none.

I need some good news...anybody got any?

Emily's Birthday

Yesterday was Emily's 10th birthday. It's kind of hard to come to grips with...ten years. Some days it seems like an eternity as I wait for her to grow up, mature and learn. On others it seems as if we blinked and all of a sudden, ten years has gone by and now she is ten.

What happened?

She grew 3 inches this past year! I'm not sure when, but she's had a major growth spurt again. She's been growing about 2 inches a year for a while.

It was a school day, so it was business at usual except that I sent her to school with a giant bag full of choco-pies to share with her classmates. I refuse to buy those nasty store bought cup cakes and since they don't really let us bake, I thought it might be a good compromise.

After school was homework as usual, a quick early dinner and then off to activity days. I did bake a bunch of cupcakes for all the girls and our family.

We did presents when she got home. She had just enough time to play with her new gifts a bit before calling it a day. We are very thankful to have Emily in our family, even if she doesn't make it easy sometimes (or a lot of the times)!

Emily's Birthday Party

We had family over the weekend to celebrate Emily's upcoming birthday. Unfortunately, only Christian's dad and his wife could make it this year. We took the opportunity of having Christian's dad here without too many other distractions and asked him to bring down his guitar so that we can do some audio tests.

Christian got some audio equipment for Christmas from his dad. His dad used to sing to them all the time when they were growing up and he wanted a way to record some of it for posterity. We have been wanting to do it for some time but the audio from our cameras were less than satisfactory. Christian did some preliminary tests on this day so that we can figure out what the best way of recording would be including, where to place microphones and stuff.

Unfortunately, it was the hottest day of the week and we had planned to bbq some tri-tip over the fire pit. It was over 90 degrees on the porch, in the shade! It's never cool when you want it to be. And you can almost always count on it being hot around here if you have to cook over a fire, work on the roof, or help someone move!

But I digress, Emily was very excited. She got a new bike for her birthday from Grandpa Caldwell.

She's been wanting a new bike...correction, she's been needing a new bike for some time now. Both Emily and Caitlyn have outgrown their bikes.

They still like to ride their bikes around, but it's kind of funny because you can clearly see that the bikes are too small for them. Caitlyn has taken to stealing rides on her sister's bike now and then when her sister doesn't want to ride it or would rather ride her scooter or jump rope instead.

So we are so very thankful for Grandpa for getting her a new bike. It was a bit of an adjustment though as she had to get used to using just hand brakes. No more foot brakes for her. It takes a while to get out of the habit. When she puts the pedals in reverse now, the pedals just spin and the bike continues to go forward.

I think she has a handle on it now. Now she needs to learn how to use her shifters. A whole new world will open up to her when she finds out how nice it is to be able to change gears to go up hill!

Of course, Caitlyn was also very happy to be able to inherit Emily's old bike which definitely fits her better than her old bike too!

After taking the girls out to ride around on their bikes and letting our big lunch digest, we were ready for some birthday cake. This year, I went with a red velvet cake. I've always wanted to try making one but dumping nearly a bottle of red food coloring in a cake plus vinegar didn't sound that appealing to me. The cake was really good though, only the frosting was too sweet for my taste. I think that I would make it again, but definitely with a different frosting!