Two months...

So this handsome devil turned 7 for reals. He had a hard time with the "change" but has finally adapted and declares himself 7. His birthday fell during the week so of course we had cake for breakfast before school!

His birthday party got snowed out so we had to reschedule it for a Tuesday after school. 7 sweet boys invaded my house - they all came home on the bus with Ben. The bus driver said, "God bless you!" And I needed the blessings! 4 of the 7 were terrors wrestling their way through our house and the others hung sweetly with Ben playing legos and reading books. This was the only semi-non-chaotic moment!!

We had a very mild Winter thanks to El Nino. The few times it snowed, it dumped on us, so we took advantage and did tons of sledding. The kids have mastered the snow board scooters and I am confident they are ready for the real ski mountain next Winter!

We had our besties over a few times - always more fun to sled with your besties!

Daddy even introduced them to fort building! Too bad the next day was 50 degrees and everything melted pretty fast.

The PTA Sweetheart dance was a huge success. It was daddy's turn to be the Sweetheart and I got to hang with the boys. I think I got the easier end of the deal! :)

We spent a few days of Winter Break in PA visiting cousins and Gramma Lou. On the coldest day ever we chose to go to the train museum - it's a National Park - who knew? It was an excellent exhibit and I'm excited to return next time we go to PA with Daddy (he stayed behind to work this trip).

My first coaching experience was a success. They were a great group of girlies and their skills came a long way over the course of three months. It was a challenge to coach Emma - she was parent deaf to me and refused to listen, but isn't that the way it always goes? Her other coaches say she is very respectful - HA!

This sparkly dolphin was lost months ago at a friends house. The friend recently found it and returned it and we have one happy Benny! Sleeps with "Sparkles" every night. 

Daddy had a birthday in early March! Don't let this cake fool you - it wasn't any healthier than a chocolate cake!!! But it sure was just as tasty. Yummmmmm.

Em & her bestie kicked butt once again in the talent show - a fierce performance of moves to the tune of Uptown Funk. We were VERY proud!

They're back! Rubies cubes have made their comeback and this girl is obsessed. She was very proud of herself as she used her own money to purchase it.

How did she earn money? See that 15 feet deep patch of land behind Ben? It is a gnarled mess of dead leaves and vines. We have spent many a Spring-like day chopping away at the vines and clearing the land. They were happy to help (i.e. get dirty!) and earned $$ for their efforts. Frisbee time afterwards! Welcome, Spring!

Duck love

So we are breaking the laws and playing hooky for a few days here in Florida. Of course we needed to celebrate Ben's birthday a few days early! He only wanted a CHOCOLATE cake and we forgot to special order one from the super awesome bakery at Publix, so we ended up with this German bunt cake which was basically a chocolate donut on steroids - YUM!!! Abuelita only had 6 candles so we made a 7 with Kat Kats - the almost 7 year old LOVED it!! Happy little man. (How do I have an almost 7 year old???? Emma is allowed to grow, Ben is not.)

Every morning the ducks are squawking when they see movement inside the house. The kids give Abuelita a break and happily handle the feedings. It's snowing on LI, and snowing popcorn here. :)

Ben was excited to receive Master Wu's Dragon - 5 beautiful bags that he is actually milking instead of putting together in one session.

We, of course, spend at least an hour here daily - it's too cold for the community pool though, so we had sad kiddos for a few minutes...

Ben is "almost" there with the pump. Sheesh kid, you are ALMOST 7!

Emma got a 500 piece puzzle for Christmas that I thought she would love. Turns out this puzzle is a b*tch - that's right, I said it. It took me and Abuelita 3 hours just to get the outside edges completed! We leave tomorrow so I taped the underside in chunks so we can redo when we return home.

The Miami Zoo was on today's menu and it was AWESOME. It reminded me lots of the LA Zoo where we used to go weekly with our pals when the Bunch were babes. We do LOVE the Bronx Zoo, we just HATE the traffic getting there so haven't been in a few years... We are going to have to change that this Summer. It truly was the perfect relaxing day. According to my fitness app, we walked 5.05 miles (10,678 paces). Good times! And they got to surf on Crocodiles...

Fall in love with giraffes all over again...

Learn about 100s of endangered species - Ben kept exclaiming at the top of his lungs every time he read a sign, "This animal is endangered!!!"

Lots of "photo moments" but this one was the silliest placement of the "face". The elephants bung hole!!  Hahahaha, yes, I said bung hole, too! Dang, hope I'm not offending too many people. Aww, shucks, who am I kidding - only 5 people read this and they are all fun loving folk!

We got up close and personal with so many great animals.  Great job, Miami Zoo. We look forward to returning to you sometime in the future.

Blue belts!

Daddy's make the coziest couches. (This is the sectional we bought when we moved 5 and a half years ago. Still super cozy even if the pillows are beat up! It will make the best basement couch when we remodel in 2018 and have a brand new full finished basement for the kiddos to play.)

The cast iron pan I got daddy for Christmas is getting daily use. Best purchase ever. From stove top into the oven and cleanup is easy. Another delicious creation by chef Daddy. Pork Chops with sautéed mushrooms and onions.

The Purple belts were the most focused I have ever seen them at the belt testing on Wednesday. It was a much more rigorous testing and I wasn't sure if Ben was going to be focused enough to get the job done. Man, was I wrong. So proud of these kiddos!!

So proud we went for DD. Giggle.

We are spending a few days in FL with Abuelita and Grandpop. Apparently Santa's elves accidentally left this at their house and so there has been a lot of this happening in the past 24 hours.

This Vectron is a big hit, too!

Daddy forgot to tell me this, but this came out of the sweet boy's mouth in the shower the other night. YIKES!!! This kid is desperate for a younger sibling. :)

Avocado

Once again Emma proves she is her daddy's daughter... That is a t-bone steak she is gnawing on - RARE! This kid will eat anything!

I absolutely love that the bunch are getting into live action movies and moving away from all animation all the time. I am especially happy that they do not poo-poo the idea of watching movies from my youth. We have enjoyed all the muppet movies and last night partied it up with Annie and Daddy Warbucks.  

We have also rediscovered out hot air popcorn popper. It has been getting nightly use! Healthy snacks - hooray!

Speaking of "healthy"... The avocados are ripe so Em & I got to work in the kitchen this morning making our deceptively delicious chocolate pudding.

Here is the recipe!

It was a hit! A little too sweet for my taste buds, but creamy and yummy and it got avocado into Ben! Hahaha. He asked, "It's good. Did you sneak something into it?" No, Ben, we would never do that to you!

My new exercise mat is getting double duty in the toy room. The floor is a cold slab of tile and this is the perfect cushion of thickness to sit on and keep the chill at bay.

Bedtime routine

Getting back into our night time routine after the holidays. In bed by 8pm and reading time! Except, Ben used to fall asleep pretty quick - now I am shutting him down after 30 minutes with begs of "just 10 more minutes??" How can I say no? He's reading!

Emma needed to read a nonfiction book for homework last night so I suggested the cookbook that tricks kids into eating healthy foods, deceptively delicious. Well that was a dumb idea because she got out of bed every other recipe asking when we could make this or that! Ha! Then this morning in front of Ben she asked me, "Mom, can you buy avocados at the store so we can make...I mean so I can eat them because I love them?" (She wants to make a chocolate pudding of sorts - main ingredient is avocado! She is so smart because if Ben knows, he will not eat it.) Hahahaha

Hooray for DENVER!!!

And we are not talking about the Broncos!

Thank you, Aunt Miki & Uncle Sean for the gift cards that were oh, so, quickly turned into Lego Minecraft purchases!! We love Christmas after Christmas!!! Xoxoxo

Impossible to get a photo where they both are smiling normally...

Wicked

We truly enjoyed our weekend in the city with our BFFs. We had 2:00pm tickets to see Wicked on Saturday so hightailed it out of the office at noon, grabbed some slices of pizza at the Italian joint across the street, and blessedly hit no traffic on our drive into NYC. We parked, dropped our bags at the hotel which was right around the corner from the theatre (total score from hotels.com) and had a quick pee before heading to the theatre. Emma was VERY impressed with the hotel's public restrooms, "Mom, this place is fancy. They have HOT WATER from their sinks!" Not sure where that came from as we haven't traveled to a third world country in a while...

Ben hasn't been feeling well - that darn dry cough has returned and we were worried he was going to hack his way through the show. We figured if he was disturbing the audience we would tag team taking him out into the back hall. Gratefully he did GREAT! Only a few hacks here and there. It turned out the biggest thing we had to worry about was the children singing along OUT LOUD with the performers while the show was happening. We had to remind them to sing along in their HEADS!

After the show, we headed over to McHale's Irish pub for dinner. It was a delicious blast! But the coughs decided to come back and you could tell Ben was absolutely miserable - didn't even take one bite of his $13 kid's meal... We decided fresh air would do him good and enticed him with the idea of a stop at the GIANT lego store at Rockefeller Center. It worked! He walked the 20 or so minutes with a skip in his step. The dads and the sons hit the lego store while the moms and the girls went into the American Girl Store so Anna could use her gift card. Now, Emma has NEVER been one to play with dolls so every time she has asked for an AG doll I have skirted it as they cost a lot of money and the accessories are ridiculous. She begged me the entire time we were there to buy her something. I help strong reminding her we just went to Disney & Legoland & saw Wicked which adds up to more than I have spent in years on Christmas! She then reminded me that Santa Clause gave me money for the tickets - that is what he said in his letter! Stupid Santa Clause... I still held strong and we escaped the store without a purchase - but I did have to text Daddy and MAKE SURE he didn't buy Ben any Legos of WW3 would have started for sure.

From the stores we realized the kids needed a little Jesus in their hearts and popped into St Patrick's Cathedral. It's the 1st time we have been in since the reconstruction has finished and it was awe inspiring to see it without scaffolding. The kids even lit candles for the two daddy's of our friends who passed away this Fall unexpectedly (Emma's idea). It was a sweet moment.

Ben declared to the entire cathedral he was exhausted and READY TO GO BACK TO THE HOTEL, so we pit stopped here first - the tree at Rockefeller Square. It was actually SMALLER than I expected it to be - even though it was huge! (I'm not sure what I had in mind, possibly something as big as the Empire State Bldg?) Posing with our pals in front of the tree!

Daddy offered to carry Ben back to the hotel. This lasted about two minutes before he was "scared". 

We said good night to our friends and made the long cold walk across town. It actually wasn't that far, but it was butt cold which made it seem far! We checked in and went to our room and was happily surprised our window from the 22nd floor had a view of Times Square!

As tired as the kiddos were, they could not sleep. Luckily I had my trusty pack of playing cards in my backpack. We snuggled into one of the beds and played some Black Jack! (If they are going to be awake, dammit, they are going to use their mad math skills!)

After BlackJack the kiddos spent a lot of time hanging in the window spying on the city below. It really was a great view!

They finally passed out around 11. So did I until 30 minutes later when Ben had a major coughing fit that turned into choking and puked all over his pillow. I guess I should be grateful he didn't touch that $13 kid's meal because it was all liquid, no chunks! ;)

We roused this morning around 9 am and slowly got ready to head downtown to Chinatown for some Dim Sum. There was no parking - we drove around for ages and finally settled for an over priced garage. The food was outrageously amazing, only one stinker dish - a "roll" filled with sweet bean paste - gross. We filled our tummies (Ben ate one time piece of Bacon that was wrapped around a shrimp) then headed back to Long Island and the realization that Winter break is over and it's time to focus on our new goals for the year!! This truly was a great goodbye to 2015 and the perfect welcome to 2016!

Countdown fun!

Our kiddos are loving reading the blog books of all their antics when they were little so I am going to try much harder to keep this journal going. So, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

My pal arranged for 5 super FUN families to meet up for Rock'n Bowl from 5:30-8pm. (Then sadly she came down with the flu and had to stay home while we partied!) It was such a blast. We piled the kids into a few lanes, the adults into the other two lanes and enjoyed the "competition". Ben rocked the kid ramp and was an absolute physics stud using the bumper and angles to score big.

Emma has graduated to the traditional bowling stance and only had a few "lofts".

Sadly, I seem to have lost my super bowling skills. I haven't scored this poorly since I was a kid! Yes, I'm the B with 52 whole points...

Afterwards, we went over to the Potter family residence to continue the fun. Only one window was broken (and not by my kids!) and we made some great memories. The kids played "Man Hunt" all night - basically hide and seek, but with two seekers working as a team. The Moms & Dads hung out in the "carriage house" all night - it didn't have heat and I was freezing. My solution? Grab Ben's coat as he was playing inside the main house where it was warm and toasty. Don't I look like I belong on the cover of Vogue with the new Winter look for 2016?

We wanted to be home before the real ball drop to avoid the crazies on the road, so we did the King Julian 2016 netflix drop at 11 with the kids. If you haven't seen it, it's 3 wonderful minutes of fooling your kids and getting them into bed earlier. Except that by the time we got home, they were wired and able to tell time - so we watched the ball drop together at midnight. And by together, I mean Daddy, me and Emma because Ben was bawling in his room because he doesn't like change and wasn't ready to say goodbye to 2015!!! I do love our sensitive little man...