Preschool Graduation

Today Nicholas graduated Pre-K!  I have always been skeptical of these mini-graduation ceremonies and have even been the person to rant about them.  After attending I felt that it was a wonderful way to celebrate going to kindergarten.  The kids got to get excited about what lies ahead of them.  I got some great video and a couple of pictures. 

The big surprise of the day was that Ed was able to be there!!  We didn’t tell Nicholas just in case he was unable to come, but he was able to and it made the day so much better!

Nicholas started going to Holy Spirit Parent’s Day Out and Preschool this past August.  His teachers were Ms. Marcy and Ms. Katie.  He attended two days a week and made great friends there.  Unfortunately his classmates will all attend other schools, so he will have to make new friends at his new school this year, but he enjoyed playing and learning with them everyday this year. 

 

Above: A picture with his teachers, Ms. Katie (left) and Ms. Marcy (right)

Below:  Nicholas standing in place below his Name Sign.  Don’t you love the graduation hat?  It is one of those cardboard type (like the old Burger King Crowns)

Another Week at the Ozuna House

Well, another week has flown by! The boys and I have been without Daddy for the most part this week. He's managing to get through this weekend of awful call duty. He went in on Friday morning at around 5:00am and it is now 8:30am Saturday morning and still no sign of him. He should be home to sleep in a little while. He will sleep all day today and we will see him to eat and spend a little time with us this evening before he goes back to bed to start another call day/night tomorrow. He will be post call on Monday morning--he'll sleep and we will see him for dinner again. Then the new week starts for him. Thank goodness he is done Friday and we will have him all to ourselves for a week. The boys miss Daddy and so do I. :)

We have kept ourselves busy this week. Nicholas went to school Tuesday and Thursday. They are winding down for the school year. Next week will be a big one as we will have a trip to the petting zoo here in town, and then his graduation ceremony is Thursday. ;) I'll get pictures and video to share on both days. Look for it to come up next week sometime.

Christian and I chilled out most of the week. We went to the Falls every morning on schedule except for Thursday. Ed needed us to bring his pager and I wanted Christian in bed by 11:30 to let him get plenty of sleep before picking up Nicholas from school.

This morning the community center is having their Summer Kickoff Carnival. The boys and I plan to head out and spend the morning over there playing games. The boys are excited about it. This will give Ed a chance to have some peace and quiet in the house today while he is sleeping and it will get the boys out of the house without costing us money. Win-Win!

I have not cooked much again this week. We also did not make it through all of the meals I planned. I still have tonight and tomorrow, I guess. I improved on my freezer Lasagna, we had grilled steaks, fresh French Bread, and homemade mushroom and cheese pizza (YUM!). I love my breadmaker! The french bread and pizza crust are so easy to make in it. I made the pizza crust last week and froze it for this week. It takes me 5 minutes to put the french bread together and creates nothing to clean up except for the pan and it is nonstick! Score!!

Another thing I have been doing this week is messing with photo editing in Photoshop Elements 5.0. This is the program that I got for scrapbooking a couple years back. I like it, but I am still learning it. This is the first program I have truly had to work at learning. It is not as user friendly as other programs. The product is worth it, but if it were not for the free video tutorials that I find on youtube and other similar programs, I would be completely lost. Here are a few of the photo editing projects that I did this week.


This first picture is from the September 11th Memorial that is put out every year here in Lubbock. Nicholas and Ed and I went out there a couple years back and walked among the flags. In this pictures I played with changing the image to black and white and highlighting just the one flag with color. I later found a much easier way to do the same thing....whew! next time I will do it the other way. :)
This next picture was taken by Grandma last year when we went on summer vacation. My mother loves this picture and I hope she really likes the improvements I made on it.
This last picture is kind of "scrapbooked". It is my favorite picture of Nicholas. He had just turned 2 when I took this picture during a summer rain storm. He was having so much fun playing in the rain. Precious!
Here are the originals, just in case you wondered:

Family Update (not on Friday)

Hey Everyone! This week has been a tiring and trying week for the Ozuna family. Ed is working many, many hours. He's been out of the house by 5:00am and back home by 7:30pm or later almost all week (he got home at 6:30pm Friday). This has meant that although he has struggled to stay awake long enough to play with the boys (or just read them a book to put them to bed), most nights the boys only saw their daddy for about 15-20 minutes. I've tried to make things easier each night by having the boys completely ready for bed, dinner done, etc...but it doesn't make up for the lack of time that the boys have with Ed. Today he is on 24 (more like 28) hour call. This means he was out by 5:00am again this morning and will not be home until after 7:00am tomorrow morning. This will make for a pretty boring Mother's Day at our house, but I have gotten used to sketchy schedules. We'll celebrate, just not tomorrow. He will go back to work bright and early Monday...and resume this same schedule next week. Then, next weekend he will be on 24 hour call both on Friday and on Sunday...only to resume the work week again. Finally, on the 23rd of May, we will leave to come home and visit all the Grandparents for a week!!!

We are all looking forward to this time to both be home with Daddy and see our family. Ed and I will relish the idea of a night out by ourselves too.

So, what have the boys and I been up to this week? Well, Nicholas has been at school on Tuesday and Thursday just like normal. He brought home a "secret" Mother's Day Gift that I am not to look at until Sunday. I am so excited and I will get a picture of it and post once I have it in my greedy little hands. :) We went and worked out every morning this week (as usual). Christian and Nicholas both love to go to the workout facility each morning and play with their friends. Since we go at the same time everyday, they have made playmates with some of the other "regular" kids.

Today we went to the library and sat in for a book reading. The library was fun...the book reading, not so much. The man who is selling the book wrote it to help raise money for Dyslexia. That is a great cause! I actually saw the guy and the book at Hastings a couple of months ago. I looked through the book then, but unfortunately it was for an older kid. The paragraphs were too long and referenced things my 4 year old wouldn't understand. However, when you are read books, it can sometimes be lots of fun! We decided to listen to him read the story because the last time we attended a library story time it was loads of fun for the kids. Unfortunately this felt very impromptu...no chairs...guy didn't have his reading glasses...no one else showed up...he read about 6 pages before realizing he had not shown the kids the pages....and he stumbled through reading it. I am happy to say that my kids did really good throughout the entire reading. Nicholas actually stayed with most of the story after he started showing pictures. Christian was "all done" with the book much earlier than it took to read the book. We left when the reading was done and he did not sell a book to us, unfortunately.

I had almost an entire week of limited cooking. This has been AWESOME! I tried OAMC (once a month cooking) a long time ago and did not like it because it took so much time! Of course we also did not eat everything that we made. I brainstormed another idea last weekend and on Sunday last week I made one week's worth of dinners (plus a couple of double dishes to freeze). My goal has been to have no leftovers left in our fridge by the end of the week. I am trying to use all the food we make and spend less money while doing it. So far it worked this week and also allowed me to tutor without having to cook all at the same time during the day. This was nice because I didn't burn any of the food. This week we had Lasagna, Enchiladas and Pinto Beans, Grilled Pork Chops and Grilled Pineapple, and Chicken-Cheese-Rice-Broccoli casserole. We were also supposed to have a chicken soup, but I didn't realize when you cook a whole lime in your pot it bitters everything. Lesson learned!

Another thing I am trying to work on is using less ziploc bags. I would say that on average we use at least 20-30 bags a week (snacks, frozen foods, leftovers). Last week I read 2 things: a ziploc bag takes 1000-2000 years to decompose AND you can turn bags inside out and dishwash them on the top rack to reuse them. I tried this and it did work. The only problem with the method is that the water gets into the bags and makes a big mess when you open the dishwasher. So, I decided I am just going to try not using them. I made an inventory of all the items leftover in my fridge, and all the items in my freezer. I am keeping the lists on my fridge and I update them when things change. This has resulted in us not having thrown away leftovers...AND NO GROSS GROWTHS in plastic containers in my fridge!!! Yay! We are using less baggies and more plastic...and I am doing well with this so far!

Tomorrow's plan? Well, at this point I figure we will get out of the house and let Ed sleep. In the morning we will go grocery shopping. I will make all my dinners for next week (plus some other freezer items) tomorrow afternoon while the boys nap. Then Ed will wake up in the evening, we will have dinner, and we shall see what else we do! :)

To all of you out there, Happy Mother's Day!!

Ranching Heritage Days

One of the nice things about our area is the Ranching Heritage Center. Once a year they have "Ranch Days" where kids can come and learn how it used to be done in the west. Everything from riding ponies to washing laundry...they get to see/experience it all. This year was fun because Nicholas and Christian got to actually experience it all and have fun. Nicholas has done some of the stuff in the past, but for the most part he was scared and didn't want to participate. This year was different because he wanted to do all the stuff, and Christian wanted to do everything that his big brother did.

Ropin' the dogies...I looked, but could not figure out what happened to the picture taken of Nicholas doing this...I'll keep looking.
The boys with Daddy. They have their stick horses that they made in their hands.

Doing laundry the old way...here Nicholas is drying his cloth.
...and Christian drying his cloth.
We made corn husk dolls--boy dolls--for the boys.
Happy boys rolling along in their stroller.
Putting mud on the log cabin to "insulate" it. Christian wanted no part in this.

Nicholas doing his part to insulate the cabin.

We had a great Saturday afternoon with Daddy. He will be gone this weekend, so we were getting in as much fun as possible. After this we went to McAlister's for lunch. Yummy!

Gymnastics Program for Nicholas's Preschool

Today Nicholas's preschool had their Gymnastics program. We decided at the beginning of the year to let Nicholas participate in gymnastics. A local coach comes out once each week to let the kids participate in a pullout program for this. He has learned so much this year from this class. The following videos are clips from his program today. I edited out most of the other kids so that you get to see our star! Enjoy!!!

Fellowship Interviews

Well, Ed has now received 3 invitations to interview for Fellowship positions. The kicker...they are all in the North East!! So far we have:

-University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
-Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD
-University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD

Apparently there are 8 spots in Pittsburgh and something like 4 or 5 spots in both Hopkins and U of Maryland.

It looks like Ed will be heading up in June for the Pittsburgh interview so he can make it to the early selection (they do their interviewing and hiring in 2 waves, so our odds will be better if he attends the early interviews). I believe he is trying to do both Baltimore interviews in August.

Friday he is heading out to Miami, Florida to present for a Conference (he calls it GAARC--I am not sure what that means). We will get him back Sunday night only to start work again bright and early on Monday. The next weekend he is on call...so I guess we will see him again sometime in mid-May. Poor guy! One day his schedule will be nicer.

Kenny’s Korral Field Trip

We have a little place south of town that is called Kenny’s Korral.  The idea is that it is a petting zoo where the kids can go and play and feed animals—all kinds of animals.  They have buffalo, camels, emus, chickens, pigs, and a bunch of other animals I don’t know the name of.  We have gone to Kenny’s Korral one time.  It was for a birthday party and Nicholas had loads of fun.  Tuesday we went for Nicholas’s preschool field trip.  This is the second field trip he has gone on this year.  The first one was to the Maize in October.  That one is pretty cool because it is a corn field that has been carved (cut) into a maze…but it is corn, so they call it the “Maize.”  Get it?  I don’t have pictures of that event, but I do have pictures of today’s activities.  Here they are:

The boys had lots of fun visiting Kenny’s Korral.  The fieldtrip was definitely a hit.  The most amusing thing about watching them was when Christian would get food for the animals.  He would grab exactly one pellet of food each time he went back to the box.  It was so funny because all these other children were trying to fit as much food into their little hands as they could and my child was getting exactly one pellet.  He was so proud of himself.