More of The Howe Girls

Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Hodges!

We spent the weekend with the Hodges in our old town of Castro Valley. We met them in Lamaze class with Samantha. Taylor is 18 days older then Sam and they are the best of friends. They have come to visit us when we lived in Az a couple times. Hopefully they will make up to WA soon! Julie coaches Taylors soccer team and they had practice Friday night and Sam got to practice with them. They had a blast!

We went to a Mexican restaurant on the water for dinner and of course we had to take pictures of them!

Julie is a workout fiend...so she made me go to the gym with her. We put the kids in the little daycare there and spent over an hour kid free working out!

We then headed over to Cull Canyon for an afternoon of swimming and trying to make sandcastles!

We got the kids all set up in their rec room and Julie and I played a rousing game of scrabble! Good times with the Hodges!!

Jelly Belly factory

On Friday the 10 we grabbed Emily and Jack and headed up to Fairfield to go on the tour of the Jelly Belly factory. Always a fun time. It sure was crowded though. We waited in line for an hour and the girls were really good about that. We bought 5 bags of Belly flops (the jelly bellies that don't make it to packaging. they are my favorite becuase most of them are doubles!) I think we ate enough Jelly Bellys to last a while though!

We all had to wear these funny hats through the tour.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Smiths

We spent the first 3 nights at the Smiths in Alamo. The girls each got one night to sleep with me on the bed and the other nights they slept on the ground in their sleeping bags. The twins for some reason thought sleeping on the hardwood and using the pad as a pillow was comfortable! Go figure!


The girls liked to start the day swimming in the pool while we all watched!

Kristina aka Samantha's Godmother!

Kristina watched the girls one afternoon so I could go to Michelle and get my hair done. She has been doing my hair for almost 20 years now and I love her!!

We went one afternoon to at Rockin Jump. What a fun place that was!!

One night we got Emily Pate to come over and babysit while Kris and I went and saw "Magic Mike!" Jordan, Jack and friends went to another show...Jordan didnt like sitting in the back seat so he crawled up between me and Jack ...Kris drove the other guys.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The drive to CA

I woke up at 2:30 Tuesday morning and tried my hardest to fall back to sleep! I was excited to get our vacation started! Samantha was too because she came in at 4 and was ready to go. We were planning on taking the Tahoe and even had the 150,000 mile check up done but when we went to pick it up from the repair shop Monday nigt the emergency break light was on even though it was off and that high pitched noise wouldn't stop telling you it was on. Jon got ahold of the mechanic but he couldn't do anything until morning and I wanted to leave at 5 am or I knew I wouldnt be able to make it the whole way. so we piled into Papa's Lincoln which gets way better gas mileage at 4:30 am! The kids were excited! But by the time we got to Everett Sydney got carsick! All over her blanket and couple stuffed animals. We had I pull over of course and change her cloths. She has never gotten carsick before but she wanted to keep on driving. She probably threw up (she doesn't like us to use the word puke) 4 more times and then she felt better. She was really good at throwing up in a cup so no more messes! The color of her skin came back around 10 and she was back to her normal self! We had quite a few potty breaks and I swear if I didn't know better that Sydney would see us pass a rest stop and about 2 minutes later would say she had to go! At one point I had to get gas and I totally lucked out by getting off and exit only to find a Costco and a Starbucks! The girls did extremely well considering they had I be sitting right next to each other the whole way. We splurged and got two more portable DVD players so for a while they got to watch whatever they wanted... Until the batteries died and there is only one cigarette charger in the Lincoln so they all watched a few shows together! We also listened to "Abby C and her one magical power" plus a couple Disney fairy books. The longest part was the last 45 minutes because they just wanted silence. I wanted to listen to he radio but nope they kept telling me to turn it off! We pulled into the Smith's driveway at 950 pm in Alamo CA happy tired and ready to start our vacation! Oh yeah somewhere in OR Samantha lost her tooth so the tooth fairy came to CA!

Monday, August 6, 2012

Ludtke Ludke Luedke Reunion 2012

this past weekend was the big family reunion in Sequim WA. We have them every 3 years alternating between Deming WA and Sequim. It's always a good time and always great to see everyone. Over 200 people showed up this year. We are all related by Marie and Albert Ludke who are my great grandparents. All of their kids have passed away and we are still keeping the tradition alive. My grandfather was the Fred Ludtke and he was their second born and he was the one who came over from Russia/Germany at the turn of the century and sent money back to get all of them here. One sisiter went to Brazil with some of Alberts relatives. I think they had 8 kids in all...