Father's Day Gift...

Just want to show off my father's day gift to Phil...

I bought the wooden photo cube from Michael's painted it, and decorated it with paper and ribbon. I thought Phil would love this at work. I also made one for my dad and my brother-in-law, but I forgot to take pictures of theirs before they took it home on Sunday.

One of the photos Phil really wanted in the cube didn't fit into the space, which is why it is empty. Luckily I have signed up for a photo digital class this weekend, so I will know how to do all this cool stuff on Photoshop Elements, like resize a photo without distorting it funny.

The Hernandez Family Portrait...

books I have read...

So, apparently (or supposedly - no one seems to be able to confirm the veracity of this claim) the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 beloved books listed below.

I read 36 of these, but most were mandatory for Immaculate Heart HS and I was bored during summer time in high school. So far my friend Izabelle Reyes has read more 49!! Anyone beat that??? Any recommendations on ones I haven’t read?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE; add a '-" to the ones you HATE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X-

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+

6 The Bible - really? the entire Bible?!?

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X+

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+

12 Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy *

13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller X

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X (took a class at UCSD)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X++

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X- (Tried reading several times only finished it because it was for HS)

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X+

19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell * (I also want to see the movie)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Started but didn’t finish)

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (started but too boring)

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen X+

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen * (I know a Jane Austen book I haven’t read)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X++(Of course what 13 year old girl didn’t love this book)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X-

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding *

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery X (Read it in French)

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X (this is technically counting twice??)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl X

100 Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

AOTP

This week Bryant and I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific twice.  Good thing we have season passes!! 

We went on Thursday with Liz and the twins.  This was the only picture we could get the boys to stand still (although not Bryant) to take a picture of all of us together.

Then we went on Saturday with Phil, Edgar, Laura and the kids...

Laura and Sofia,  I wish I had a girl...

Afterwards we went for dinner to the Yardhouse.  It was great to see the Perez Family, we wish they lived closer and could hang out all the time.

Then Phil and I went to celebrate Sandy's 40th Birthday!!!  We tried to party like rock stars, but Bryant did not want to go to sleep (even though it was past midnight), which was a little of a buzz kill.  Darlene did a great job with the decorations.  I wish I would have taken a picture of the bowl with all the "Sandy" pictures on it.  It was such a great idea.

It was a busy Saturday, not to mentioned that it all started with a 5 mile run at 7 am!!  We are training for the Long Beach 1/2 Marathon.

falling asleep while eating...

My parent's joined us for breakfast at Schooner or Later (one of our favorite places for breakfast)  on Sunday.  We could not stop from laughing because Bryant was falling asleep while eating...

In case you noticed, Bryant has a bad fall that Sunday morning.  He was trying to use the curtains to hold himself up to walk, and instead hit his head right on the corner of the sliding glass door and the wall and then hit his head again on the metal threshold when fell.  I saw him as he was trying to use the curtains but I could not run over fast enough to catch him...my poor baby.

guess who is walking???

This weekend he decided to walk more than a few steps... especially on Sunday. We were at my parents house celebrating my grandparent's 54th wedding anniversary, when Bryant decided to start walking with his balloon. I guess the balloon gave him the confidence to walk alone. My parent's video taped the whole thing.

I took these picture on Monday evening right after he had reached for my open water bottle on the dinning room table and poured it all over himself. I didn't realize he had grown tall enough to reach for things on the table.

Starting position. He is just standing and staring at me.

(Notice that Triton has Bryant's sock in his mouth and Phil is just watching. Bryant for some reason is able to walk without one sock or shoe. I would have imagine that to be difficult since it would throw his balance off.)

...walking towards me...

...he is running past me towards the hallway.

Happy Birthday Max and Eli

Yesterday was Max and Eli's 2nd birthday. We celebrated by going to Chucky Cheese. Although it was last minute planning, we had a ton of fun...

The beautiful and very yummy pineapple upside down cake my sister made. (Sorry you missed out Dad! Our Dad loves pineapples.) She does make really good cakes, but she is after all a pastry chef. But for my birthday she made me rice crispy treats, not that they weren't good , they were delicious but I expected a chocolate cake. Do pastry chefs make rice crispy treats???

Max blowing out the candle

Eli blowing out the candle

Wow, I don't know who had more fun the boys or Phil...I wish I had a picture of Phil on some of the rides it was hilarious.

Yes, I know, Bryant has no fear...I would have been afraid to have been up that high. I am afraid of heights. He on the other hand want to be up there the whole time and would get upset when the ride ended.

All of this reminds me that Bryant turns one next month!!! I have to plan his 1st birthday. Wow time flies. The last time we came here Bryant was about 1 month old, and the twins were about 14 months old. The twins were just starting to walk and not too much into the games. Now Bryant is trying to walk around everywhere, and the twins were not eating because they wanted to ride on the games the whole time. Max would just come to the table pick up a chicken wing and then take off again with the chicken wing in hand.

1st haircut...

Well.. he needed a haircut...We were hoping that it was not going to be until after his first birthday, but as you can see it could not wait any longer.  

He didn't cry or mind the haircut.  

I did have to hold him because he was trying to check out Jaime, my friend and hair dresser, the whole time, and wanted to see what she was doing.

So cute... Do you think he looks like a little boy and not like a baby any longer??  I think he still looks like a baby, my baby!!