Childhood Flashbacks

We were sitting around the dinner table finishing our desert and reminiscing about childhood things. Of course, Dominic and Mikey were talking about some of their favorite TV shows from when they were a kid. That's when Dominic let go with his comment about one of his favorite shows when he was a kid: "The Mighty Morphine Power Rangers!" Leslie and I couldn't stop laughing!

Sunday Gems

I had another one of those crack up moments that I had to share. The girls have been getting into their Webkinz toys and enjoying every minute of them. Rebekah just got a new Webkinz animal. It is a cute Toucan bird that she calls Tina.

We went to Mass as usual, but this time Rebekah brought along her beloved Tina with her. We didn't mind as she had fun having Tina sitting next to her. We went along through Mass as usual until we came to the "Our Father". As is typical in most parishes, everyone joins hands with their neighbor and sings the Our Father. I took Leslie's hand and began singing as usual. Not long after we began I heard this muffled chuckle from Leslie and so I looked over to my right to see what was up. I looked over to see that Rebekah was holding the left wing of her stuffed bird in one hand and the lady to her right was holding the bird's right wing! The lady had a big smile on her face and of course Rebekah was singing the Our Father with everyone else! I tried not to but couldn't help cracking up. Of course, Tina had to participate in the sign of peace as well. Thankfully, we made it through the rest of Mass without incident.

Computer Literacy

I had to write this one so that I don't forget. I came home as usual and of course was approached, this time, by Rebekah for permission to use the computer. All the kids want to use the computer for something....email, youtube, games, whatever. The girls have gotten into these little stuffed animals called webkinz. For those of you that have never heard of them, here's an explanation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkinz

Anyway, back to why I had to write this post. Rebekah asked if she could use the computer. I checked with Leslie to make sure that there wasn't any problem that would prevent her from using the computer and then logged her on. She launched the browser and I could see that she was fumbling around trying to get to something. She told me that she wanted to get to webkinz and so I looked in the history, found it, and selected the site. Without thinking about it I walked away to help with dinner. Shortly I heard Leslie talking to Rebekah and making a big deal out of something and so I walked back over to see. Rebekah had put in her ID and password and successfully logged into the site. I saw the ID before she had hit the Enter key and it was quite long! Man! I have half of my work people that can't remember a login ID as complex as what I saw Rebekah do! Where the heck do these kids get this?! Oh well, I better stay sharp or the youngsters are going to leapfrog ahead of me before I know it!

Vacation in Seattle: Part One

Of course now that we moved away from the Seattle area what does the family want to do for vacation, go back of course! This wasn't such a bad thing because summer time in Washington can be breathtakingly beautiful. While we lived there, we usually went down to California and Arizona during the summer time. This of course is crazy since it's much cooler up North, but we have seldom been known to do things in any conventional kind of way.

We looked at our driving routes to get there and one thing kept coming up. With the cost of gas going up and up it was going to get real expensive just to get up there and back. I've been saving frequent flyer miles since I started working up there in '04 with the thought of taking Leslie to Hawaii. At the rate we are going I figured we might never go and so I looked into how many flier miles it would take to get us up there. It tuned out I had enough for everyone and so for the first time, the entire family would take a trip on a plane. Visions of life insurance and wills briefly crossed my mind, but I figured if anything happened, we were all on the plane except JJ and he would be fine! With my rationalization session complete, we were off to Seattle.

Bringing all the kids along in an airport was a first for us. At first we moved along like a small mob, but they were too hard to keep track of that way! Finally I made them all follow me in a single line. They looked like a line of ducklings and so I had to quack and tell them to follow along. The girls were amused, but the boys weren't.

The flight up was uneventful and we got a great view of Mt. Rainier on the way in. We went and picked up our rental van and spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to get all our luggage loaded into it and still have room for all the kids! Strike one for hotwire and it's description of the van. We managed to get the back end of the van closed and headed out from the airport. Now that we were moving we needed to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to go first! Does anybody else make out plans for what you're going to do on vacation? Sigh...

We decided that we'd go to the beach and looked up the location for Dash Point State Park. We found it without too much trouble and we were thrilled with the views. Did I mention that it was sunny? Four years of living there and we finally had some sunny weather! We had never visited Dash Point and we really liked it. You come down from foothills above it and drive down to the park. When you come into the park there are large grassy areas with picnic tables, barbeque's, and several different playground areas for the kids. There were lots of large trees for shade and it all overlooked the beach area down below. This beach area actually opens up to Puget Sound and not directly to the Pacific Ocean. The water is still quite deep and extremely cold! You definitely don't want to swim in it! We had a great time there and spent several hours enjoying ourselves. Here are some more pictures of the day.

Dad's 70th Bday

We started our summer vacation in Southern California. We visited Leslie's mom in the mountain for the 4th of July. We then came down for Dad's 70th birthday party.

Of course we arrived a bit late! You can't be a Kunz and arrive on time. Well, that's what I tell myself from time to time. I always blame being tardy on the kids anyway! When we arrive there were quite a bit of folks there already. It was nice to see all the aunts and uncles there for Dad's birthday. I realized that it had been awhile since I had last seen them together.

It was nice to see Jeff and to meet his wife. I didn't get to chat with them as much as I would have liked, but that always seems to be the way of these get togethers. Not enough time for the number of people there. Anyway, we all had a great time! The kids, of course, chased Grandpa's chickens and roamed about "the farm" as they call it. At one point Sarah was looking for rabbits. Mari pointed out one that was out aways away and told her that if she caught it, she could keep it. As we watched her race after the rabbit, Mari looked over and said that she might be in trouble as Sarah was gaining on the rabbit. Thankfully, the rabbit went underneath something and got away. Anyway, here are the pictures that I took from that day.
Leslie and Uncle Barry
I caught one!
Can you guess what I'm going to do to this chicken now?
The siblings
Jeff, Melissa and their boys
Isn't she cute Dad?
Can we please have a puppy?!

Dancing Queen

Leslie and I went to a charity auction that Sarah's school put on as a fund raiser earlier this year. We had never been to any kind of auction before and it was kind of fun! We managed to get a winning bid on a basket full of fun things for the kids to do during the summer. One of them was a series of dance lessons for a local dance studio.

Sarah had a vollyball training camp scheduled to go to so we signed Rebekah up for the dance lessons. She has been having a great time learning dance. For the littler kids they go between different dance styles to keep the kids from getting bored working on just one thing the whole time. She has been having fun learning ballet, tap, and what they call Pom & Cheer. Now she is dancing around the house all the time! Now we just have to make sure that she doesn't get dizzy spinning around or bump into too many things! I can hear mom singing it now... "Dancing Queen..." (Sorry for the ABBA flashback!)

Gymnastics

I really like the YMCA! It provides a great place for the family to go to work out, swim, and do other neat things. The girls have gotten involved in the gymnastics program at the "Y" and they continue to get better and better.

Sarah and Rebekah both enjoy going every Saturday. They've moved past the basic moves and continue with their conditioning and flexibility. I don't know if this will continue as a long term love for the girls, but we're enjoying watching them have fun with it!

Mikey's High School Graduation

Mikey finally did it! He graduated from High School and we are very proud of him. Mike's classes all had competitive grading and he had to work quite hard. He did very well and maintained a 3.8 GPA for his Senior Year.

We were debating whether or not he would graduate this year. Because of his autism diagnosis he is eligible to stay in High School if there are still IEP (individual education plan) goals for him to achieve. We considered having him stay in High School to have the school system pay to place him in a vocationally oriented school called EVIT (East Valley Institute of Technology). They have a program in Film Making/Media that Mikey was quite interested in. In talking with the school, it appeared that EVIT would not accept Mike coming there through the school system. (It turned out later that their advice was complete baloney, but we didn't know that at the time) Anyway, with that information there didn't seem any real reason to keep him in High School and he was definitely interested in experiencing the graduation experience with his class and so we agreed to let him graduate. He was very proud going through the ceremony and so were we. Lots of "thank you's" to all of you for your cards and congratulations for Mikey. Here are some pictures of his big day.

Easter Visit

Once again, we took advantage of being close to California again to come on out for a quick visit. We came out for Easter and had a nice time visiting with Leslie's mom and the kids had a chance to see some of their Wilcox cousins. It was also a chance to get the little monkeys all dressed up for a picture. Here's how they looked. It's so hard to get them all to hold still for pictures, so if you see a copy of of one of these handed out around Christmas time you'll know why!

March Visit to Seattle

Mt. Rainier in distance.

When we left Washington, there were a number of things that everyone missed. We all missed the beautiful green trees everywhere. We also missed our small church in Covington. It was a close knit community and we felt very much a part of things there. Mikey missed his Life Teen group at church most of all and was the most upset about leaving those people that he had grown close to over our years there. To help ease the transition, we agreed that he could go back to Washington in the Spring for the Life Teen retreat at our old parish.

The retreat was in March and we made all the arrangements to go. We had Alicia come out to watch the kids over the weekend and then Mikey, Leslie and I flew out to Seattle so he could go on his retreat. Of course this left Leslie and I with something that seldom comes our way. A weekend getaway without the children!

We got a hotel in downtown Seattle and spent the weekend roaming the city seeing things that Leslie never had time for while we lived there. We went on the underground tour of Seattle and roamed through Pike's Place Market. Me also managed to have dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant in Seattle, Assagios. I also also took her on the bus so she could experience that, but we mostly walked everywhere. Boy, were we tired by the end of the day! We had a great time as did Mikey. Here are some of our pictures from that trip.
Beginning of underground tour.

Underground the Pioneer Square Area.
More underground areas.

Picture of the old city.
Yes, it's an old chastity belt.
View of Puget Sound.

Leslie and I