This is a little late but Mason turned 14! They are growing up so fast. I am having a hard time believing he will be in high school next year. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! I still see him as my sweet 3 year old boy. (unfortunately he doesn’t smell the same). We love Mason. He will always be my little boy even though before long he will be taller then me.
I am once again way behind. I have given up on catching up. Last month we did hit a milestone. We now have a 16 year old. This also means that Chris was able to get his learners permit. AHHHHHH!!! They do things a little different here as far as drivers licenses. You can’t get your permit until you are 16 then you have to drive with an adult and take a driving course before you can get your license at 17. There are so many kids here that don’t even get their license until they are 18. It is not the right of passage for some as it was where I grew up. I got my license right when I turned 16 and I was out on the roads. (Sounds scary now that I have my own 16 year old.) I am also learning why parents shouldn’t teach their kids to drive. I let Chris drive home last night. (My hands still hurt from gripping the handle on the dash) Alex thought she was going to die. We are looking in to driving schools. I told him that I will let him drive more after he takes a driving course. I don’t think I was prepared for this stage of life and it only goes down hill from here. Mason just had to inform me that it will be his turn in 2 years. All I can say is AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Stephanie is making me write this. She is also making me write that I have only one more year until I am over the hill. Yay.
Now that the formalities are out of the way, we had some Halloween fun outside of making fun of my age. We only carved 8 pumpkins this year, they seemed to be hard to come by, and expensive (thanks, Adam Smith). We did get one free thanks to Sarah’s fine performance in the 5th grade pumpkin run (she got 2nd place). But the kids had fun nonetheless. Everyone but Chris and Claire went out trick-or-treating.
Chris sat motionless on the front porch with a bucket of candy in his lap and waited for unsuspecting suckers. They would come up in groups and he’d let a couple of them get candy, then scare them. They would all debate if he was real or a dummy (we have our own opinion some days), and some even poked him. In the end, he was the winner and scared everyone. One lady wouldn’t even come back up on the porch to get candy for her kid. She made her husband go up. (Click the photo to embiggen)
Kate had a blast. She walked the whole way, and everyone loves to give more candy to a cute little witch. So it worked out good for me. And she is Daddy’s girl, so she likes Reese’s as much as I do. They all came home with tons of candy, and Mason had a fit when we had everyone put their candy into the community bucket. Now he can explain socialism to his social studies class.
I treated everyone to a birthday prime rib that I grilled, along with some twice-baked potatoes and Gulliver’s creamed corn. Stephanie even made me my favorite 12-layer cookie cake. I scared the kids with my hillbilly costume. Mainly with the teeth. Kate wouldn’t let me kiss her with them in. We had a fun Halloween.
Click here for the whole set of Halloween and birthday pictures up on our Flickr site.
Sarah turned 11 (almost a teen) and had a happy birthday. She got the vest she has been asking for since last year, a hoodie, and a set of Legos, since the boys are not very sharing with theirs. She also got a watch and some games (both board and electronic) so she was thrilled.
Click here to see a set of her birthday photos on our Flickr page.
Sarah decided earlier this school year to try out for the school play. She’s never tried anything like this before, including singing or acting in front of anyone, so we were surprised but encouraged her. She made it through all of the auditions and callbacks to find out she had won one of the lead parts in the play! Very exciting.
This was at the first part of the school year. She had weekly rehearsals and she spent a lot of time learning her lines and songs. Well, last week it all paid off. She performed for two nights and did a great job. She played the part of Gillian, who is supposed to marry the prince. This meant she had to sing a solo in addition to lines and singing with the rest of the group. She did a great job (and that’s not even a biased Dad’s-eye view!) and it was very exciting to see this side of Sarah. She is a talented girl and we’re very proud of her.
Unfortunately, this also reinforces the fact that she’s growing up. I may have to get my rocking chair for the front porch, and the companion shotgun, earlier than I thought.
Click here to see a set of photos from the play.
The full video of the play is still uploading – I will update this post with a link in the morning. Unfortunately the HD was too large to put online, so we made it as big as we could.
UPDATED: Here’s the video. It’s about 35 minutes long, so grab some popcorn! You can also click here to go to the Vimeo page for more options. Also, the Vimeo page has larger video, and the correct aspect ratio.
Well, it’s been 5 days since Claire was born. We brought her and Stephanie home from the hospital on Friday and spent the weekend trying to catch up on sleep. Monday Steph decided it was a good day for Claire’s first bath. Her cord came off and so she was ready to go. It would be a fair assessment to say that she didn’t like it. It was pretty much one non-stop scream from entry to exit. It was cute, and I’m sure one day she’ll appreciate bathtime.
Click here to see the photos of Claire screaming in the tub. Pretty cute.
At long last, Claire Allison is finally here! She arrived at 7:07 AM on April 23. She is 8 lbs 3 oz, and is 21.5 inches long. The girls came along to see the delivery and they were so excited and delighted to be the first to see Claire. They were full of questions and got the full tour of the facilities.
Stephanie is doing well, though she is tired and sore. She delivered Claire naturally, though this was not her intention. When labor finally kicked in (after 6 hours), it was too fast to get her an epidural. But everything worked out and now we have Claire.
She had a busy morning. Besides being born, she got the normal baby poking and prodding. She ate breakfast (she is really hungry!), got a bath, and took a nap. Now the older girls are napping and I think I need a nap too. We’re all going to visit Mom and Claire this afternoon, and it would be good not to be falling asleep driving to Middletown.
Click here to see Claire’s first set of photos.
UPDATED: Added some more pictures! Click the above link to see them.
Since spring finally appears to be here, we have a couple photos with a springy theme. Click here to see the full set.
We’ve got the kids in their Easter outfits and some shots of tulips. Not everything has bloomed yet, so we’ll have more to come.
 Tulip depth |
 Kids in their Easter outfits |
If you’re not a regular follower of our family, our oldest son Chris plays the bass, both upright and electric. He’s part of the jazz band at Washingtonville high school, which is an extracurricular thing. They had a concert a couple weeks back so we tried out the new HD camcorder.
He was able to use the bass that had pickups and could be amplified. This means we were able to hear him over the rest of the band! Very exciting. The jazz band does pretty well for a high school group, and of course, we thought Chris did great too. One funny thing though, he neglected to tell us he needed a black shirt to be “in uniform”. You’ll notice he stands out in his bright white shirt!
We uploaded the videos to Vimeo in HD. If you have a pretty recent computer (read: pretty speedy) and some kind of high-speed broadband Internet connection, you can probably watch in HD. To do this, just click on the HD icon in the video. You’ll see it at the top right of the video window when you put the mouse there.
Here I am getting behind again. Having three birthdays six days apart makes it difficult for me. At least that’s my excuse. A few of Mason’s friends came over on Saturday and Chris took them to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D at the IMAX theater. When they came home the ran around outside playing whatever it is 13 year olds play. There were plenty of sticks, oh I mean swords involved. We made pizza but apparently they only kind his friends eat is cheese, (boring!). They claimed they were not hungry because they ate popcorn at the theater. It is the only group of boys I have come across who where not ravenously hungry after running around outside for an hour. They did have a well balanced dinner of ice cream and soda. They finished off their evening playing on the Wii. On Sunday, Mason enjoyed opening his gifts, eating his favorite special meatloaf and 4 cheese macaroni and cheese. We followed it up with a white chocolate cheese cake covered with Reese’s peanut butter cup crumbs and white chocolate. After the amount of birthday cake we have had this month it is good we don’t have another birthday until August. Click here to see more pictures from Mason’s birthday.
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I have finally finished Claire’s quilts!!! I normally only make one, but when I went to buy the backing for the first quilt I saw the cutest new fabrics and I just couldn’t pass them up, so I decided to make a smaller patchwork quilt as well. They both turned out really cute and I am very glad I was able to get them done before she was born. Click here if you would like to see some close ups of her quilts.
Yesterday we celebrated Alexandra’s 8th birthday. It took me most of the day to convince Kate it was not her birthday. She is catching on and Alex was nice enough to let her help open her gifts. She even sang a nice happy birthday song to Alexandra instead of to herself which is what she has been doing since the party on Saturday. Between the two of them we have the cheesiest grins I have ever seen! If you want to see more pictures from her birthday click here.
Alexandra has been going crazy for weeks waiting for her birthday party at Build-A-Bear. I think she woke up at six in the morning and started asking if it was time to go every 30 minutes. I took her to pick out an ice cream cake and balloons to pass the time. Everyone had a great time picking out their animals and marching all over the store. We then came back to the house for cupcakes and ice cream. I think everyone ate 3 or 4 cupcakes before running off to play. Later in the evening we took her out to eat at 5 Guys burger and fries. Thats one party down and one more to go. What was I thinking having 3 birthdays in March all a week apart.
I am playing a little blog catch up before I get any further behind. Last Saturday Chris took the girls out for a date. They told me I was a girl too, so I got to tag along. He took them up to the Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum in Poughkeepsie. We spent a little time checking out the ice floating in the Hudson River and then they spent an hour running all over the museum checking everything out and doing most of the activities three or four times. The museum was really small and we knew it was time to go when all Allie was doing was playing hide and seek, or playing tag with a new friend she had made. We had time to kill before dinner so Chris, Sarah, and Alexandra played a round of miniature golf, some ski ball, and air hockey. Kate’s favorite part was pulling the tickets out of the machines and stuffing them in her pockets. The girls thought that was the best time ever. He then took us all out for teppanyaki. The girls loved the susi and their dinner entertainment. Even though we were all stuffed the girls insisted on topping it off with some Cold Stone Ice Cream. We had a great date and the girls are already asking when they can do it again.
Click here to see more pictures from their date.
Well, after a long wait, and even longer comparisons and feedback, we decided to STOP publishing videos to YouTube due to the changes they made. These changes affect the quality of videos viewed. We decided to go with Vimeo because the quality is better. You can even do HD, which is good because we now have an HD camcorder. Vimeo is free, but you can upgrade to a better class of service, which you cannot do with YouTube. Apparently people have been complaining about these quality issues with YouTube for the better part of a year, but YouTube isn’t quite sure why they are occurring.
Anyway, here are some of our videos. They are a combination of piano recital videos, and Mason’s choral concert. Both occurred in January instead of December due to New Yorkers’ fear of winter weather. Click on the photo to go to the related video album.
 Kids’ Christmas piano recital |
 Mason’s 7th Grade Choral Concert |
 Chris with the All-County Orchestra |
And more to come soon! We’ve got video of Chris in the All-County High School Symphony Orchestra, and it is about ready to go.
UPDATED! I ended up quickly editing the video we took of Chris at All-County Orchestra at the end of January, and published it last night, well, early this morning. My lack of sleep is your gain! Click on the All-County Orchestra link to go to the corresponding video album.
Now we should be mostly caught up, but you never know what I’ll find going through other videotapes!
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 | marianne stamm on Happy Birthday Alexandra!… |
 | Girls Christmas Dres… on Girls Christmas Dresses |
 | Dawn on Claire’s Baby Blessing a… |
 | Julie Weiss on The Princess and The Pea |
| Dawn on The Princess and The Pea |
