We celebrated Lane’s 6th Birthday on Saturday at Plain Grandma’s house. He picked a Spongebob theme. Who doesn’t love Spongebob? He’s lucky to have such a talented mommy. She made a board with Spongebob on it that the kids were able to pin faces to, and then they cut a hole out to take pictures with their faces in. She served lunch (star shaped sandwiches and various salads) in sand pail buckets and made “crabby patties” out of cupcakes for dessert. Cute, cute.

My oldest two babies Katelyn and Tanner

Micah and Lane

Feed the animals!

Love this little girl’s freckles!!

Pin the face on Spongebob

Water balloon toss — quickly turned into a water balloon FIGHT!

Spongebob pics!

Picture of summer… picking Gramma’s berries in a swimsuit!

Such a cute pinata - getting ready to take a beating!

McKenzie trying to keep Airheads from Myndi

Little mini cupcakes cut in half and stuffed with frosting and a mint patty for the burger.

I bought Lane Star Wars boxers, he was trying to hide them LOL

Love this picture of my mom with Lane & Bailey:

McKenzie enjoying Katelyn’s kitty, Falston.
He was so playful and cute.

Bailey giving Shelby some love:

I could have held these cuties all day:

The coolest little boy I know is celebrating his birthday today: #6!! It’s so hard to believe how old he’s getting and how big. Holy moly… I hope you have a great day Laners!

You rock for a ton of different reasons, but here’s my favorites:

You are a fantastic snuggler!

I have loved watching you and Bailey grow up together!

You grace us with some quiet moments.. when you are sleeping!

You can shop with the best of us!
And at a store that sells pink crap no less!

You remind us that little things like balloons are exciting!

Your mama is pretty cool too!

Our family needed another boy in the mix!

Your future’s so bright you have to wear shades!

Your smile is contagious.

You know you are pretty rockin’ when…
your cousin Kenzie shares a bite of CAKE with you!

You’re an excellent driver!

You blend in well with your very pasty auntie!

You are a monkey! And monkeys are COOL!

You make a good cover
for when someone needs to do some diggin’ in their nose.
’sokay Kenzie… your secret is safe.

You are a ginormous CHEESEBALL!

You are one of Cone Guys & Girls best customers!

You are almost as big as your cousin that is 8 yrs older than you!

DUDE! I bet you didn’t know this, but…
You are a Spudders fan!

You know how to rock a muscle shirt!

and give great hug and kiss combos!

And… you are just all around an awesome little dude!!

Happy Birthday Lane!

We love you!

I’ve been inspired by some fellow bloggers to make a Summer Bucket List. I make a list for everything, because that’s the kind of person I am, but never thought to make a list like this. It’s been fun! I kind of went a little crazy, and maybe I won’t be able to check all of these things off my list, but it’s a reminder to enjoy some things that I forget to sometimes. I have things that are *just for me* and things that are for my *whole family* (family: did you know I signed you up for this?) I threw in a few productive projects in there also, just because maybe if these things are on a list that I’m putting out there for all to see — maybe they’ll have a better chance at getting finished!

I’m encouraging my kids to make bucket lists too, so hopefully they will.. and I will share them when they do.

1. Pick berries
2. Go for a hike
3. Read with the kids as they do the Summer Reading Program (wish they had one for adults ) *working on this 6/25*
4. Organize school supplies
5. Clean out mine and Bailey’s closets
6. Finish pond or fountain with hubs
7. Go through ginormous tub of pictures and put away Done 06/26/10
8. Finish cross stitch project
9. Make something with popsicle sticks
10. Get my van’s brakes fixed
11. Paint my kitchen
12. Get all digital pics organized and uploaded
13. Eat a tomato we grew ourselves
14. Go to Farmer’s Market *6/27/10
15. Play in the lake *7/7/10*
16. Organize my kitchen cupboards
17. Camping!
18. Learn to knit
19. Play hopscotch
20. Run through a sprinkler (without planning on it!)
21. Organize craft stuff
22. Clean up laundry room and organize
23. Make homemade ice cream
24. Start kids’ recipe/cookbooks
25. Learn a new card game and teach it to my kids
26. Go to a drive in movie
27. Date Night!

I will try not to remove anything from this list unless it’s been completed. I’d rather add to it than take away from it. I don’t believe in removing things from lists once they are written or you’ve defeated the point of the list in the first place.

Money is tight, so big elaborate gifts aren’t in the budget this year for Father’s Day. Instead, we are celebrating David with giving him a day off from the kitchen. Yes, he’s the head chef here at The Ullom-Clark household. He cooks while I clean up his messes. Don’t mistake that for a complaint. This is something I’m very thankful for! I work until 5pm every day, and I love that cooking a meal is not something that I have to worry about each evening.

Today, he didn’t have to worry about breakfast, lunch OR dinner. Instead, he got to pick the day’s menu, and we are cooking for him. I made breakfast burritos and hashbrowns for breakfast, we skipped lunch and snacked instead. Dinner is his choice of beef stroganoff with his favorite yummy garlic breadsticks. He requested his favorite carrot cake, which is baking in the oven now — delighting all of our noses It’s a lazy day, with movies, games and relaxing — which is a gift for the entire family. Happy Sunday!

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The makings of a fantabulous breakfast burrito!

Bailey was my little game buddy today.

Nice to be lazy and watch movies together

Snacks and games — that was our day

Tonight was our Home Owners Association’s Ice Cream Social… the girls talked us into heading down to the neighborhood park to take part in it. We went about 20 minutes before it was over, and they were out of ice cream. Awh, bummer… so the kids played for a little bit and then we decided we’d make our own sundaes instead. I baked a batch of brownies to go with them on request from the hubs. Tanner and I enjoyed some brownie batter instead.

So our evening went something like this:

The popsicles available at the “Ice Cream Social”

None for us, but we got a few minutes of play time in anyway

Came home and made our own ice cream sundaes after dinner

Giggly girls

This is what we affectionately call “the stink eye” here

All that followed up by some Pretty Little Liars for me and the 2 little ladies

And some Transformers Chess for my boys

David won this game, but I suspect that he won’t always have an easy time of winning.

What an easy, enjoyable night –

And not to forget my Ashlyn… who was with her grandparents… she hasn’t seen her daddy in several weeks, so she’s very excited to spend some time with him this weekend. Miss you Ashlyn!

Take a peek at pictures taken with Great Grandma in Portland, OR over the weekend.

REG’s Free Family Film Festival is Now Showing!
We have planned a fun-filled summer of select movies for kids and parents. Regal has proudly offered this free summer fun since 1991. Oh, did we mention that it’s FREE!

Selected G or PG movies start at 10:00am every Tuesday and Wednesday during the festival. Tickets and seating are first-come, first-served and are limited to theatre capacity.

The Free Family Film Festival is safe, lots of fun and a great way for kids to spend a weekday morning in the summer. Tickets for our 2010 Free Family Film Festival are exclusively available at select theatres’ box office on the day of the show.

Here is a listing of movies for our closest theater, so you can see an example of the movie titles playing. I’ve been more impressed in previous years. Rugrats The Movie, really? But, they are free — and there are a few good ones in there. They pretty much rotate the same titles at other theaters in the area also, but you can check your local free movies showtimes here.

06/22/2010-06/24/2010 Tale of Despereaux (G) Coraline (PG)
06/29/2010-07/01/2010 Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything (G) Astro Boy (PG)
07/06/2010-07/08/2010 Charlotte’s Web (G) Planet 51 (PG)
07/13/2010-07/15/2010 Rugrats The Movie (G) Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (PG)
07/20/2010-07/22/2010 Rugrats In Paris (G) Kung Fu Panda (PG)
07/27/2010-07/29/2010 Wallace and Gromit (G) Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (PG)
08/03/2010-08/05/2010 Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (G) Monsters Vs. Aliens (PG)
08/10/2010-08/12/2010 Doogal (G) Hotel For Dogs (PG)
08/17/2010-08/19/2010 Muppets From Space (G) Paul Blart: Mall Cop (PG)
08/24/2010-08/26/2010 Muppets Take Manhattan (G) Aliens In The Attic (PG)

We are 38 days away from our Southern California trip - YAHOO! Very exciting! There is still so much to do to prepare for this trip, I am in NO rush. We are hitting Disneyland/California Adventures for 3 days, Sea World for 1 day and Universal Studios for 1 day. We will have 1 day with nothing planned just to enjoy the California sunshine (praying for that anyway!)

The kids got a special treat in the mail today. Several Disney characters were kind enough to send us postcards. VERY special. It made the girls smile ear to ear. Tanner even got one from Eeyore, and though he wasn’t as excited as the girls, it was nice for him to be remembered *I* even got one addressed to “Princess Jessica”. SWEET! Loved it… and just adds to the anticipation of our trip. :)

If you are considering a trip to any of the Disney parks, I highly recommend looking into a “Fairy Godmother” for your family. I found mine at www.mouseplanet.com, more specifically this forum thread.

Our Great Wolf Lodge opened a couple of years ago. Nice to see the Northwest getting some of the cool things we usually only hear about/read about in other parts of the US We had been planning to go for awhile. We were going to take the kids for our anniversary but that never came to pass. David made reservations a couple of weeks ago and we surprised the kids with a trip up there on Thursday (we had no school on Friday!). The kids didn’t know where we were going until we pulled into the parking lot. The waterpark is very visible from I-5, but they were so oblivious to the outside world, all “plugged in” to their DSI’s and such. They had been begging us to tell them the first 30 minutes of the drive, but they eventually gave up! I have learned a lesson in this…. I will not tell the kids about a surprise until we are arriving at our destination. We had told the kids a week or so prior to going up there and I swear I never heard the end of it… “please just one hint, Mommy”. No! LOL.

The kids all screamed and were super excited as we pulled into the parking lot and they saw the giant sign that said Great Wolf Lodge all sparkly and pretty. They had seen commercials for this place. We’d driven by it many times. So, they were well aware of this place!

If you are planning a trip here and want to be as thrifty as possible, I suggest the following things:

Bring your own food, water, snacks, etc. It isn’t cheap to eat at this place. They have an expensive Dinner/Lunch/Breakfast buffet. Breakfast was $13.95 for adults (10 and up) and $8.95 for kids (9 and under). Dinner was something like $17.95 for adults and $13.95 for kids. not cheap They have a Pizza Hut Express, where can get a medium, 8 slice, pizza for $11.95. 3 Breadsticks for $3.95. This seemed to be a popular option for alot of people. This is what we chose for our lunch on Friday. Individual sodas are $2.95, so we opted for a 2 liter from PH that was $3.95 and we got 6 cups. That worked perfectly and we saved $15! You can’t take your own food into the waterpark area, but you can eat in the lodge, or right outside the door at tables with your own snacks. That is what we did. We also had a microwave and fridge in our room, so we had snacks, microwave popcorn, etc. for when we were done swimming on Thursday night.

Go during the week if you can, it’s cheaper! Look for discount codes before making reservations. We used a 20% off code we found. Sign up for their newsletter and get email specials! This is for the Grand Mound location. If you are elsewhere, change your location.

If you do Magiquest, it will add to your bill. One idea we had was to purchase the game for our whole family. It is $25 per game ($14.99 for the wand and $9.99 for the game), we could have shared the experience and saved ourselves $75. We didn’t do the Magiquest, but we watched others do it. It looked like fun. It was just not in the budget this time around.

Splurge and book the Kids Cabin or even bigger! The girls each had their own bed and it was separate from the main part of the room… they had their own TV and everything. It was very cool!

And… pictures!

Here’s a short video tour from youtube. This isn’t our video (because we are lame and forgot ours!), but you can see the inside of the park

We leave for Southern California in 61 days! But, who’s counting? We are all getting really excited. We will be leaving the evening of Friday, 3/26/10 and plan to drive all night, arriving in LA Saturday evening sometime. Ashlyn’s dad is getting married that Friday, so we won’t be leaving until that is over. She is going to be a bundle of excitement that week before with all of this going on. Yikes!!

I am sure that night will go smoothly, the kids will “plug themselves in”, as we call it. iPods, DSI’s, DVD players, etc., and entertain themselves to sleep! But, I am looking for ideas for my two youngest girls (ages 9 and 6) for the waking hours. There is only so much DSI and movie playing that can keep them from squirming. I want to make them little bags or baskets that they won’t be given until we leave with activities. I won’t post what I’ve gotten already, because they are surprises. I don’t have much yet though… any ideas? Post them in a comment if you do

The drive home will be much of the same, leaving a little earlier the following Saturday and getting home Sunday afternoon. I know it will be easier doing this trip with older kids than it was when they were babies, but I want to be as prepared as possible. They probably argue in confined spaces more now th It’s a LONG time to be “stuck” in a minivan together! LOL!

I’ll update as I get some more ideas

No Apologies.

It is what it is. Things have been busy. I feel bad, because this blog is supposed to be a record of sorts for the kids and these blips that I go without blogging… is a blip in the timeline of events in their childhood. BAD! But…. we do what we can, don’t we?

A quick look back at the last few months, which have pretty much been a blur. Life is going too quickly!

Just about the time I took a break from blogging, on 11/20/2009, NEW MOON came out! My friend Crystal and I took our girls (her daughter Brittney, and two of mine… McKenzie and Ashlyn) to the midnight showing. Brave, we were! We bought tickets to the 9pm showing of Twilight… and I’m so glad we did. The lines were Disneyland’s nightmare…. wrapped around buildings… and such… we were sitting in a nice warm theater… watching Twilight and got first pick of seats for New Moon. PERFECT. We had a great time…. and have already made plans for Eclipse. My girls are racing to finish the book New Moon, hoping to start and finish Eclipse before the movie. It’s nice to share the love of this series with them. We are all pretty much obsessed. Anyway. PICTURES.

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Here’s some pics of a walk we took last weekend at the Wildlife Refuge. Good times.

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And, some pics of some of the holiday festivities. Woohoo!

CHRISTMAS EVE JAMMIES!

It snowed very briefly for just one day - just Ashlyn was here to play out in it…. it was so pretty! Wish it lasted longer.

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