Garden Park Everglades

BeforeSplish Splash

How can you say no to this face?

After

So it's been raining here for 6 days straight now. Not just a little rain here and there but our yearly total of rain in less than a week. I'm so over living in Seattle. Oh wait that's NOT where we moved. Anyway there was a small respite this morning. It was brief and we even saw some blue patches in the sky. We were thrilled to be able to be outside. The girls wanted to go to the park next door and run around for a bit. They knew the blacktop would probably be the only surface available to them so they brought some balls to throw around. We ran for a bit but the lure of the giant puddles in the field was just irresistable. So we went home, put on grubby clothes, picked up Daddy and went back. Worried about pneumonia and neighbors calling the cops for child endangerment, we couldn't stay long but man did they have fun sliding in the puddles, kicking water at each other and giving Mommy big hugs while dripping wet. Emily claimed it is a new tradition any time we get rain like this. Fortunately by the time we get another series of storms like this she'll be taking her own kids.

After getting home, taking a warm shower and eating a hot lunch everyone was cozied up watching a little TV. When Daddy was done eating he was ready to head to the grocery store to buy what we need for our Christmas Eve celebration. Claire characteristically did not want to go. We told her that it was fine to stay home but the TV was turning off either way. Daddy said he didn't want to get home and find Claire staring at the TV. He did his best impression of a slack jawed, mesmerized, lost to the real world TV viewer. Claire took one look at him and said, "I don't do that! I keep my mouth shut!" That girl.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Letter 2010

Merry Christmas all!

The Leeb family is soldiering on, in the face of stiff opposition. John’s plans for a quick transition to a new career has taken an unwelcome turn, but after a year at JC Penney, things are looking up recently. Jenn continues to work at Disneyland and loves it. Recently she attended a breakfast commemorating her first year anniversary. Around the dinner table that night, she explained her chagrin to discover it consisted of only a glass of orange juice and a Danish in a wrapper. I mentioned that hot breakfast is really the way to show someone you care. Claire took it one step further, “Here’s how you make breakfast,” she paused dramatically with one hand poised over the table, “first, you kill something!” and she performed an air karate chop. We all started laughing, so she amended quickly, “Not just anything…whatever you want to eat.” We’re not savages after all—killing things in some early morning ritual to appease our pagan gods. “Then you cook it and eat it. That’s how you make breakfast.”
One of our daughters is nearly a vegetarian. Claire is not that daughter.

In April’s Easter break, Holly took Emily and Claire to Utah so the girls could get some snow time with Uncle Paul and Aunt Kim. They snowboarded, ice-skated and played in the back yard snow. Emily woke up one night to watch the snow fall, decided it was worth waking up Claire too, and they pressed their noses against the window just like they’re supposed to.

We’ve spent the last year enjoying Disneyland. With Jenn working there, the price is right. Emily loves the thrill rides (especially if her shorter sister is not allowed) and so we have spent a lot of time at California Adventure. My parents also purchased Knott’s/Soak City passes for all of us and we made the most of it during the summer.

Emily has a good friend with Leukemia (complete remission) and decided to donate ten inches of her hair to Locks of Love. A week after the cut she dressed as Amelia Earhart for a report at school. For this kind of planning I get no credit--she takes after her mother.

I was asked by my good friend Karl Bertain to perform a wedding service for him and his new wife Margarida. My utter lack of credentials seemed to bother neither the couple nor the state of California. A Universalist church was happy to take my $8 and send me a wallet-sized card saying I could perform weddings. It was a brief but lovely ceremony among the pines in the Sierras above Bishop. We made it a weekend camping trip and visited the Bristlecone pines, thousands of years old.

My brother and his daughters, Magdalen and Natalie, came to visit in July. They went to the beach and Emily said afterward, “It’s like having cool older sisters.” What more can you ask for?

Jenn’s high school reunion was in August. She found it hard to imagine that so much time has gone by and wondered if it would really be worth attending. The answer was absolutely yes! She got to spend the day with her 3 BFFs reminiscing as they looked at yearbooks, old letters (yes the handwritten type) and photos.

The tyrant mouse wouldn’t let my wife have two weeks off during Disneyland’s busy summer season so we went to Wisconsin without Jenn. Frogs, deer, tubing, canoeing, picnicking and all-purpose adventuring. We especially enjoy the time spent with Michelle, Jason, Zach and Mara.
Since Garden Grove Unified starts the Thursday after Labor Day, we had two more days of summer vacation than most and elected to visit the Getty Museum. We stayed about three hours, or two hours more than I thought the girls would tolerate, and they said they want to return to see more.

I had two fatherhood dreams come true this year. I coached Emily’s soccer team, the Fighting Flamingos, to a fantastic season (but a less than stellar record). Claire developed very quickly on her team, Pixie Dust. Soccer was great fun for us all. Also, we went rock climbing in Joshua Tree over Veterans’ Day. Good friends, stories around the campfire, star gazing, scrambling and hiking. We set up a rope on a steep slope and had fun struggling up and rappelling down. We even saw a desert tortoise! I lived in Yucca Valley for 2½ years and never saw one, but we spotted a juvenile alongside a trail to an oasis.

Emily chose to learn the violin at school and has already performed in a group recital about two weeks ago. Mary Had a Little Lamb is rarely played by a string section of forty: sounded good though.

If any of you have ever asked for directions to our house, you know the last phrase has always been, “You can see our five palm trees from a half mile away.” That is no longer the case. We have had them cut down—a thrilling and terrifying, and strictly vicarious experience. The tallest was 85 feet and this guy climbed up with three-inch spikes on his insteps and a harness with a loop of chain attached. Then, once he was at the top, he would haul up the chainsaw, start it, and the bombardment would begin. First surprisingly heavy palm fronds, then sections of trunk that THUNKED into the yard so deeply we felt it even while standing on the driveway. Once the wind picked up and the trees were swaying five or six feet, they decided to hang it up each day. There are large pieces of the bases left. If you know anyone who needs 300 pound sections of palm tree trunk, let us know. We won’t deliver, but we can help lift.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The Leebs

Weekend? What weekend?

'Tis the season... when no one get to stop and there are so many fun things to do! Just a quick run down of our weekend. Not too many details or I will be here forever typing.
Friday:
The girls started off their weekend with Bend the Rules at school. The last hour of the school day is dedicated to doing all the things that would normally be no-nos. There is candy, soda, toys and fun for all the students who met their reading goal this trimester.
It was also report card day. No complaints here! We are always so proud of our girls.
Dinner was at Grandma Wendy and Papa John's house followed by our annual walk around the neighborhood with the overly decorated houses. It's fun to see our favorite decorations year after year. This year Claire was especially interested in making sure each heard of reindeer had at least one Rudolph present.
Saturday morning we finally got to see Tangled. Once a movie has been in release for a few weeks, Disney employees get to see it for free. It requires standing in line for awhile but the price is right! The girls and I left straight from Downtown Disney to drive up to Thousand Oaks. Grandma Holly had a full agenda for them there. There was a New England lighted house village to set up, two gingerbread houses to decorate and a super secret shopping trip to do. After dinner we went to Camarillo to see Aunt Kristin perform with her church choir. Emily loved being able to watch the orchestra play from a fairly close position.
Sunday morning we wasted little time and were back in the car to head home. After a quick lunch and a change of clothes, Claire got dropped off with her Brownie troop to go see the Nutcracker ballet. Emily and I didn't want to be left out of our yearly tradition so we went to a different production of the same ballet at the same time. We all rendevouzed back home later in the afternoon. Our Christmas tree had been delivered on Saturday while we were gone. It and the house needed some decoration. That lasted until almost bedtime. Phew! It's amazing how with a little planning you can sqeeze so much into a short amount of time.

Bye Bye Palm Trees!

As much as the palms gave a sunny so cal look to our house, they were messy and on occassion dangerous - those big fronds fall when it gets windy. So rather than get them trimmed we decided to remove them. Correction we had someone else remove them.

It's hard to tell from this picture but step one was to get up inside the fronds and cut them down.

Most of the trunk pieces came down in smaller sections than this thank goodness since it sounded like a war zone as each piece hit the ground.

After the fronds were gone each piece of the trunk was cut. Yes he's up there with nothing more than spikes on his shoes, a chain around the tree and a lot of bravery!

Somehow removing the palms made the sunny so cal weather go away too. Coincidence?

Joshua Tree

The girls wound up with a 4 day weekend at Veteran's Day thanks to a furlough day. We took advantage and made a reservation to camp for two nights in Joshua Tree National Park at Indian Cove Campground. Our friends the Zs and Bs came with us. We drove out Thursday after lunch and spent the first afternoon setting up our campsite. When you make reservations online its hard to know exactly what you will wind up with but in this case we could not have chosen a nicer site. The campground has many rock formations and the campsites are nestled among the rocks. A lot of the sites we saw were narrow - wedged between the rocks and the gravel road. Our site was in a horse shoe shaped formation so we were surrounded on three sides by rock. It was very private and since it was windy, protected too. The sites are fairly primitive. We had to fill up water containers at the ranger station about two mile from the campground and the bathrooms were glorified port a potties. But the beauty of the surroundings more than made up for the inconveniences. As the grown ups worked on setting up the kids quickly got acquainted with the rocks surrounding us. Two walls were fairly steep but the third had great rocks for scrambling. They spent all afternoon finding caves and playing war games. We were pretty sure that someone would tumble eventually but the worst injury all weekend was a scrape.
Around 3:30 the sun dropped below the ridge near us and the temperature plummeted. Fortunately we had prepared and everyone started layering on clothes. Soon after we started the campfire and dinner. Since it was pretty dark by 5:30 we ate early. That meant we had a long evening by the campfire. S'mores and talking filled in the time until about 8:00 when everyone was ready for bed.
Friday morning dawned bright and early. We were up and going by 7:00. It was still pretty chilly but a nice warm breakfast got us going. Again the kids scrambled on the rocks in our campsite until John packed up his gear and took us for a walk to another area in the campground. There he climbed a relatively easy route and set us up with ropes. Emily was first to volunteer to make the climb. She carefully found her hand and foot holds and without too much trouble made her first official climb. She was estatic. She even did a great job rapelling back down to her starting point.
Little Jake was next on the rope. At 3 1/2 he wasn't quite ready to climb all the way to the top. So we lowered him down and let Claire go next. She was gung ho to scramble up. Her shoes were not as willing to go to the top. At one point she had lost both. Fortunately Troy was in a good position from his look out spot to help her put them back on. Once they were on tight she practically flew to the top of the rock. She really liked rapelling too.

Dean was next to go. He did fairly well getting started but right at the point of no return, he lost his nerve. He was having a hard time trusting the ropes to keep him safe and just wanted to scramble like he was used to on the other rocks. We coaxed him to the top where he had to spend a few minutes collecting himself before coming back down. He never did get the hang of rapelling. He was really trying to slide down the rock which made him even more nervous. After he finally go down he was done for the day on the ropes. Fortunately he went right back to scrambling on the rocks so he really wasn't scared off of the whole experience.

Emily and Claire each wanted another turn and did fabulously. Claire certainly didn't have any issues with trusting the ropes. On her second climb she started to lose her shoe again. On a fairly steep part of the rock, she sat down, adjusted her shoe and was back to climbing in no time. It was pretty amazing to watch. Not to be outdone by my girls I had to give it a try too. Of course the kids make it look so much easier than it is. The foot and hand holds that they found so easily apparently disappeared when it was my turn. At one point I thought I was going to have to end my climb and start back down. But when I leaned back into the rope to start down I realized I could make the next step up just as easily as down. So I did make it to the top! I had to head down fairly quickly before I started thinking about it too much. Once everyone had had the turns they needed we cleaned up and headed back to camp and lunch. John had to climb back up to bring our gear back down. Unfortunately he made his job even harder by throwing things down and getting them stuck on the plants growing on the side of the rock. He had to reach out unroped to free it. I had to watch else where.

After lunch I thought we would go to another spot to do the ropes again but the kids were just as happy playing on "their" rocks. It was a relaxing afternoon of scrambling, reading, napping and just enjoying some time off.

Again dinner was early right around sunset. After dinner we got the fire going again. John started telling stories of the ancient gods and godesses. Dean was enraptured. When John needed a break we started telling stories in the round. One person would start a story line then turn in over to the next person to add onto it. The stories got pretty ridiculous pretty fast. The girls declared that we should tell stories like that every time we go camping in the future though. One of our recurring characters was Awesome Squirrel. He seemed to show up in every story that we told. The other cool thing about the fires was watching the light flicker on the rocks around us. It could have been really spooky looking but instead it was just beautiful.

Saturday morning came early again. After breakfast it was time to clean up camp.

While we were rock climbing, Karl and Margarida had found a nice hike that they told us about. Once the cars were packed up we drove to the Fortynine Palm Oasis trailhead. Getting to the Oasis took us along a 3 mile round trip walk. There was some altitude gain so it wasn't the easiest walk but the kids made it without too much complaint. Claire and Dean were our guides on the way to the Oasis. They had picked up some Junior Ranger guide books and were busy reading and trying to identify the various plants we found. Emily was busy taking pictures for a Girl Scout badge she is working on. Once we made it to the Oasis, we rested for awhile and tried to convince Emily that we were truly at an oasis. I think she was picturing something more along the lines of Hawaii. While we rested we overheard some other groups talking about a desert tortoise that they had seen on the way. We tried to identify where they had seen it but there just aren't that many landmarks to identify where they had seen it. So we joked on the way back that we should keep our eyes peeled for a tortoise. Sure enough as we were talking, Troy says, "There it is." Calm as could be. Shannon and I were sure he was joking with us. But sure enough we looked where he was looking and there was a little tortoise cruising along just off the trail. We stopped to watch him for a few minutes and take a few pictures. The next group that came along seemed more intent on getting right in the poor creature's space. The guys took the kids and kept up their walk. Shannon and I stayed behind to glare at the offender until he started walking again too.

We had one more stop to make on our way out of town at the Information Center so I could get my patch and the girls could turn in their Junior Ranger books. Emily hadn't really gotten into it but Claire was busy checking off what she had seen and filling in the blanks on the pages. At the Information Center, the Ranger talked with Claire for a few minutes, quizzing her to make sure she had really done everything she had written about. He was especially interested in our tortoise siting and even wanted Daddy to fill out a report. (Ironically he couldn't find the paperwork.) When he was done he got everyone's attention in the room, made Claire raise her right hand to take the Junior Ranger oath, then presented her with her badge and a book. The book is not for sale and can only be earned by Junior Rangers. It was so cute. The Ranger certainly could have just handed her her badge and book and been done with it but he really made her feel special.

We've been wanting to make a trip to go climbing for awhile now. It went better than I could have imagined. John fulfilled one of his dreams to see his girls in harnesses hanging off of rocks. They are hooked and will certainly want to go again. We are getting better at camping. It seems to get easier each time we do it (even though we missed packing a bag of food into the car this trip! oops) Despite my best efforts we have become a camping family but I love it because I love the people I go with.

Halloween

It is still a few days until Halloween is officially here but the celebrations are well underway. Monday we went to Little Monsters at Disneyland. It's a scaled down version of Mickey's Halloween Party just for Cast Members and their families. There were 18 treat stations set up throughout the park and just a handful of rides open. We went on Haunted Mansion (duh it's Halloween!) and Space Mountain. It gets dressed up as Ghost Galaxy in October. I'd never seen it changed over since the line is usually so horrendous. At the party it was only 10 minutes! Yay! It was silly scary and kind of fun but I still prefer the usual version. By the time we had hit all the stations and the 2 rides the event was over. Quick but fun! Amazingly Claire even got recognized in her costume. She's a character from a relatively obscure cartoon series that she is hooked on right now. One of the girls working a treat station just happens to be dressing up as Katara as well and knew Claire right away. She was thrilled to be noticed and I was happy that I had been able to put something together that was recognizable to someone who knew what they were looking at.

Tonight we went to visit Greatmother and Greatdaddy at their place. The residents were hosting trick or treat stations and had done tons of decorating around the different halls. We had fun walking through and admiring all the work that had been done.

All Safe at Last

Like so many others I've been transfixed by the rescue efforts going on in Chile for the last 24 hours. Every chance I got I tuned into the news to find out how things were going. I'm so relieved that everyone including the rescuers are safely out of the mine finally. I don't know if they will ever make a movie out of this story (seems a safe bet though) but I can't imagine how they could make it more captivating than the actual events. Congratulations to everyone involved. Job well done!