The Perfect Saturday

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anthony.silva — Monday, February 25, 2008 @ 10:06 pm

Saturday PicnicThis past Saturday, we went to the closest body of water we have in the Phoenix area – the tempe town lake. We brought a blanket, a picnic basket, a mini-football, and Mayble! We sat down and had lunch (sandwiches that Mommy made) in a grassy area.

After lunch, we started walking down by the edge of the lake and after a couple minutes, we noticed a little toy floating by in the water – what else would it be but a Hello Kitty face! If you’ve looked at the girls’ birthday party pics, you know they LOVE Hello Kitty. How random and how funny!

Tackle Daddy!After that we played some tackle football. Actually, it was mostly Daddy laying down on the ground and Mimi and Yaya jumping on him. 🙂 Our day at the park ended with a walk down the rest of the “shore” of the lake. On the way home, we stopped for some gelato!

 

Our 1st Recital!

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anthony.silva — Thursday, February 21, 2008 @ 12:49 am

Ballet RecitalToday (the 20th, actually), we had the last class of this session of our ballet class which means we had our first recital! 🙂 We got to show Daddy and Nana all our ballet moves (although, we did catch a pretty mean case of stage fright with all the other parents looking on!). There are plenty of pictures up in the group gallery (and if Daddy gets videos working on the website again, we’ll have some videos, too).

Today was also Tata’s birthday so he came over to visit us and we all took a nap! Then we gave him his present that we made for him (a mug that we painted at As You Wish) – he loved it because it was from us! 🙂

All Caught Up!!

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anthony.silva — Sunday, February 17, 2008 @ 10:32 pm

FINALLY!! We’re all caught up content-wise (blog entries, photos). All the way through the girls’ 4th (!!) Birthday Party last weekend! 🙂

A couple other things we’ll be working on shortly are more of the header images you see at the top of the main page. We’ll probably add an average of 5 a month or so from here on out so that there will always be something new to see at the top of the page. Also, we’ll be updating the style of the photo galleries and guestbook to match the main page as well as working on a new favicon (the little icon that shows up next to the “http” in your web browser) and then retro-fitting many of our posts with photos!

New Look!

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anthony.silva — @ 12:22 am

Daddy gave the site a quick facelift. 🙂 We turned the site into a regular blog with links to our photo galleries and guestbook (and external favorites!) on the sidebar. Doing this gave us quite a few options for new graphical themes and we chose one that had clean lines and similar colors to our old layout. We also categorized all the blog posts so you can find posts by categories such as holidays, birthdays, events, outings, family updates (usually, these are updates on what the girls are up to or what they’ve accomplished), etc. We still need to update the themes for the photo galleries and guestbook to match the new front page theme, tho. We also want to make the picture at the top a randomly chosen one from a group of images (UPDATE: this is working now – for now, we’ve got 5 images up there – keep refreshing/visiting until you see them all!). Look for these updates soon!

Let us know what you like or don’t like about the new look!

P.S. Don’t forget, the photo galleries are now linked on the top right —>

P.P.S. Photos links are over there —> 🙂

Update (9:00PM): Photos through the end of 2007 are now up in the galleries! Almost there… 🙂

Deadly Creatures!

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anthony.silva — Saturday, February 16, 2008 @ 2:03 pm

No, this isn’t a post about the girls when they don’t get what they want. 😉 It’s a little PR for daddy’s new game that was just announced on Valentine’s Day.

Deadly Creatures

Daddy’s been working on this Nintendo Wii-exclusive game for over a year now. He’s mostly been responsible for writing the code for how the wii controller interacts with the game and the code for the combat systems and some of the camera systems. Here are a couple links:http://www.deadlycreaturesgame.com/ – this is the main site where you should always be able to find the latest information

http://wii.ign.com/articles/852/852222p1.html – this is the most in-depth preview that came out on our announcement day, there’s a few exclusive screenshots here that aren’t on the main site

Leave some comments to let us know what you think!

Yet more pictures added!

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anthony.silva — @ 12:06 pm

Happy Halloween 2007!
Now we’re caught up through the end of 10/07. You’ll be able to see the finished product, in terms of our pool project and some of the fun we had with it once it was finally done. You’ll also get to see Mommy’s birthday cake and the girls’ Halloween costumes. You might notice that they wore them A LOT during the month of October – and with good reason – Nana spent hours open hours sewing all those beads and sequins on to them. 🙂

We’re almost caught up!

P.S. I’ve setup a reminder for myself to make sure we update more regularly. 😉

A few more pictures added…

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anthony.silva — Friday, February 15, 2008 @ 2:59 am

Added pictures up through the end of 5/07 – still lots more to go to get caught up. 🙂

In case you’re wondering about the time of this post – yes, that’s right, it’s about 3AM – Mimi is having one of the girls’ infamous fever spikes right now and I’m on watch until it gets down to 98 again (pretty close now).

Update 9:52PM: We’re caught up through the end of 7/07 now – we’re getting there! You can see almost all the pictures of the process of getting our pool put in including the day we started adding water and our first real swim in it!

Update 11:54PM: Daddy wanted to upgrade the wordpress (blogging software) version. That snowballed into upgrading mysql, which was a pain in the tush to get back and get the databases and users restored. Here we are with the blog back – next will be to get the photo galleries back – stay tuned…

Update 12:10AM (2/16): Galleries are back! Now if I can just get rid of that blog header… :-/

Update 12:43AM (2/16): I give up – the new header stays!

Check out our little buddy’s blog!

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anthony.silva — Tuesday, February 12, 2008 @ 1:21 pm

Zane
Our neighbor Zane’s daddy has setup a blog just like ours at http://www.thehumanglynnproject.org/ – he’s a cutie! He’s also got a new post up about our b-day party – go check it out! 🙂

Has it been a WHOLE YEAR already??

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anthony.silva — Monday, February 11, 2008 @ 10:28 pm

Amazingly enough, it’s been a whole year since the last time we posted! So many things have happened since then, it’ll be hard to remember them all, but here we go…

Happy 3rd Birthday!

The girls’ 3rd birthday came and went – this was the first year where they seemed to understand it was their birthday and as you can see from some of their pictures, they also knew how old they were! 🙂

Flower Girls!They were also the beautiful flower girls in our neighbors’ wedding (once again, there are plenty of pictures!). We had to coax them to come down the aisle as their shyness got a grip on them during the stroll. But, they made it and everything turned out beautifully – in a couple months they’ll be flower girls in Uncle Shaun’s wedding!

A little bit after the wedding we had a near catastrophic event take place in the Silva household when our computer’s hard drive became corrupted and we nearly lost all of our beloved pictures and the captured memories of the girls’ lives so far. Luckily, a recovery program got us 99% of everything back and we’ve been backing up ever since (which reminds me :))…

MoneyMore exciting news that happened around their 3rd birthday was the revelation of how to know when to go to the bathroom and potty training was complete. This literally saved us over $100 a month that we were spending on diapers so we are very thankful for the girls for this (not to mention the greater prevalence of fresh air!).

The girls also started the “Home Schooling with Nana” program this year and have since learned to write all their letters and count to 100 (they can also count backwards from 10). They can also write their own names and have an ever growing vocabulary which includes words like accordion and fuschia (spelling??) – they also seem to knock us over with new words almost every day. They’re very up on their colors and can, without hesitation, distinguish between lilac purple, regular purple, and fuschia – which daddy definitely can’t do.

Our New Pool!As the housing market was beginning to take its downturn, this year saw us contemplating our housing situation, but eventually deciding to stay here and plant some thick (read: expensive) roots in the form of completely re-done kitchen lighting, a room makeover that turned our spare room into a craft room/play room/mommy’s workshop for her wreath business, and last but, CERTAINLY not least a resort-quality pool/water feature and patio upgrade (pictures of all this will be up in the galleries shortly). Along with the addition of the pool came, of course, swimming lessons for the girls. After a couple months of lessons and the last few weeks of swimming at home once our pool got finished, they’re not quite water-safe yet, but they’re getting close! 🙂

Ballet ClassAlong with Nana’s home schooling, the girls also started ballet class once a week at the community center and were just given the compliment by their teacher of being the best students in class and really learning what she’s trying to teach. We’ve had a couple recitals at home and they are looking more and more graceful with each one.

Happy Halloween 2007!For Halloween this year, the girls were Chino Poblanos (mariachi dancers, for those not hip to that term). They entered a contest at our local park one afternoon and were given an award for best pair in their age group (they didn’t do places for this contest, but we think they were 1st place – but maybe we’re biased ;)). We quickly surrendered the reward (cold stone creamery gift cards) to Nana since she spent countless hours sewing sequins and beads on these amazing authentic outfits.

The girls have also become quite handy with a mouse and monitor and can find their way around the disney website to play games and watch videos, etc. They also enjoy stand-alone preshcool games on the PC and have a blast with viva pinata on the xbox and all things mario on the nintendo wii and ds (these “accomplishments” make daddy happy to no end – finally he has gaming buddies to play games with – only now, getting a turn happens much less frequently!). They’ve also been known to drum along in rock band in practice (easy) mode with ~40% score on some of the easier songs – it’s pretty amazing to think that a 3 yr old can keep some semblance of a beat using a drum pad!

Merry Christmas 2007!For Christmas this year, the girls’ star presents were princess bikes with training wheels. Unlike the ATV’s of last year, they both quickly took to them and love riding them up and down the block. They also have enjoyed their growing/talking puppies that know their names. This was also the first year where they seemed to understand that Santa was coming, because unlike every other night of the year, they went to sleep within minutes of going to bed – they knew that Santa was watching and knew when they were sleeping and when they were awake!

Happy 4th Birthday!And, back full circle again, the girls’ 4th birthday and birthday party have just gone by. Highlights of the party included find (and keep) the lost twin bears, pin the tail on the donkey, break the pinata (which ended up having to be broken by its maker – Nana – if you ever need an unbreakable pinata, give her a call!), and of course lots of cake and ice cream!

Hopefully, we can start to keep this up to date a little more often, but in case we don’t, see you next year! 😉