New Year!

Princess Marli and Princess Mia

So, things have been busy for us this year thus far. I'm teaching tons of dance classes a week in public schools, choreographing for a musical and a show choir, teaching cake classes and I just finished performing in The Gondoliers at Lyric at the Birch in the role of Tessa. Whew! Not to mention, being a wife and mother on top of all that. Somehow, I manage to be home enough so my daughter knows who her mommy is and Ibis knows who his wife is. Ibis is super busy, too, with calling high school basketball games and working full-time, sometimes overtime.

Marli is growing and growing and growing! She loves to talk and is so curious. She loves her "so sunny days" and is just a precious gem. I'm on a waiting list for preschool for her to start in the fall at Sevick Elementary. It's a reverse mainstream program. They are looking for normal-functioning 3 year olds to be examples in classes with children with Autism and other disabilities. Since it's decidedly cheaper and Marli has been around Tristan (her cousin with Autism) for 3 years, I felt it would be a good match for her. We'll see how she does if she's accepted.

I'll be starting Faust in the chorus at San Diego Opera next month and will be choreographing in the summer. I'm also auditioning more and have a big one coming up in March for all the theater companies in San Diego. That should get me lots of work....at least I'm hoping! :)

The Big 3

We had a busy busy weekend planned for this little girl. We did Disneyland on Friday with Ibis, myself and a friend of mine and didn't get home until almost 1am. Whew! If that wasn't enough, we got up the next day and went to the San Diego Zoo with my mom. She has passes and got us in for free. :) We were there all day and then I came home and made my homemade spaghetti sauce for the party/dinner for Sunday evening with both sides of the family.

Marli had such a blast. We dressed her up as Princess Aurora and we got pictures with Jasmine, Tiana, Belle, Woody and some army guys from Toy Story. I try to get pictures with different characters we've never seen every time we go to Dland. She LOVES Disneyland and can point out anything you ask her to point out on the map. She even knows the place I like to take her for lunch. LOL!

If any of you have ever been to the San Diego Zoo, you would know that it's so incredibly hilly that one can burn a ton of calories just walking around pushing a stroller all day. Oy! I had two days of being on my feet and I was dead by Saturday night!

The Sunday party was great! She got so many presents (mostly clothes and just a few toys) and had so much fun having all the attention on her. I made her cake (Sleeping Beauty) and the whole dinner for about 25 people. We had a pinata that she refused to come outside to hit. However, she insisted that she get her own bag of candy from it. We ended up having the other kids in the family hit the thing and some of us grownups too.

Anyway, she had a very fun weekend and so did Mommy and Daddy. :o)

Gigi's Over

I had one of the best experiences in being Gigi at Lyric. What a great show it was! I am so grateful for that theater company and their belief in me as an actress/singer/dancer. I wish I could do every show there! The final Saturday performance was magical. I'm not sure why exactly, but there was something about it that just spoke to me and made me truly understand why it is that I perform and why I was given my talents. I'm so happy that that was the performance that they taped. :)

Me during rehearsal...This was a photo taken for the Union Tribune newspaper for an artical that came out the day before the show opened.

Me and Leon Natker, General Director of Lyric at the Birch

Benjamin Robinson (my Gaston)


Leigh Scarritt and Rita Cantos Cartwright in background, me and Ben after ballet number
Me and Leigh Scarritt as my Aunt Alicia
The Night They Invented Champagne! Rita, Benjamin and myself

Happiest Place on Earth

This year, Ibis and I decided to get annual passes for Disneyland. Let me tell you, we're making the most of them! I bought them in May and I've already been 5 times! I'll be going again tomorrow, too. :) Here are some fun pictures we've taken the past two times we've gone.

Cute pic of Marli with her brand new Minnie Mouse hat.

We had it embroidered with Marli Jayne on it.

This was taken while standing in line for Pirates of the Caribbean.
Marli LOVES The Sword in the Stone. She watches that movie all the time, so it was appropriate to have her try to take the sword out!

Last time we took Marli, she was so scared of all the characters! Finally, this last time she warmed right up to them. She gave them hugs and she was smiling. Much better!

It was the end of the evening and we were getting Marli's hat embroidered over on Main St. Off to the side, kind of out of the way, Minnie, Mickey and Goofy came over, so we got right in and took pictures. Goofy was all silly (of course!) and he wanted to include the janitorial staff members who were standing around there. :)

The Mouse himself!

Waiting in line for Pirates.

A mommy and Marli pose.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've NEVER seen the Fairy Godmother around at Disneyland. I had to get a picture!

I love this statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. One of my favorite places in the park.

We were first in line over at California Adventure to see Mickey.

She LOVES Disneyland. She gets so excited the whole week before we go.

Of course, we had to get a picture of Cinderella (or C-lella, as Marli says)

Obligatory pic at the entrance.

Cute Words from Moo

She says:

-bodeddy (spaghetti)
-disland (Disneyland)
-gerplize! (surprise)
-honey bird (hummingbird)

Just needed to write these down before I forget and she gets all big on me and speaks properly! *sniff*

A Novel Idea!

One thing I've always wanted to do is write a novel. Is it something I've ever gone to school for? No. Is it something I am particularly good at? No. Since I just ended those last two sentences in prepositions, I think I'm well on my way to a bestseller! LOL.

I've been a bookworm my entire life. My mom used to tell me that she'd have to "unlearn me how to read." She and I happen to be grammar freaks...meaning that we notice and call out any typos we find in anything we read. I would have to correct my friends' notes that they'd pass to me in school. It would bother me to no end when they'd misuse the different spellings for "your" and "you're" and especially "to", "too" and "two"! I would read in the bathtub, on the toilet (okay, who doesn't?), in the car, under the covers when my light was supposed to be out, on the couch....you get the idea. My parents would drive me to the library every 3 weeks to check out my books. I'd check out the maximum number, which was 23 books, and return all of them three weeks later, having read all of them. These weren't picture books. They were full-on novels. I rarely would watch tv. I think I'm making up for that now in my adult life. My mom even bought me a light that would go around my neck and flip up to shed light on the book I'd be holding on my lap. That's what I'd use under the covers. Hee hee.

Anyway, I decided to finally jump on it and get crackin' on my novel. I believe I've come up with a fairly good plot that will have some appeal to many different readers. I don't want to reveal too much here. You never know if it ends up being a Harry Potter or Twilight phenomenon! Right. It does have a vampire element and some supernatural super special stuff. Like my alliteration? Check back on my progress through this new journey into the world of writing fiction. I've already written 3 whole pages. Wow.

Florida and Bahamas Vacation!

Ibis and I were able to get away on a wonderful vacation, just the two of us. In January 2009, I got an email about a free cruise. All I had to do was call them up and pay about $250. That included a 3 day 2 night cruise to the Bahamas from West Palm Beach, Florida. Well, that was too cool, so I did it. Then, they said that if I pay an additional $150, I'd get:

-2 nights in Ft. Lauderdale, FL

-2 nights in Orlando, FL

-a rental car for all 7 days of the vacation

-all food at the hotel (breakfast, lunch, dinner) covered

So, yeah, I decided that for $400, that was a pretty decent deal! It was a headache trying to figure out when we could go. I wanted to do this for Ibis's 30th birthday in April, but life was so busy that we couldn't get away until the end of June into the beginning of July. Well, I needed to book the vacation within 1.5 years of booking, so we barely made it!!!

Here's what we did:

We arrived in Ft. Lauderdale on June 27th in the evening. We checked in and then pretty much just relaxed at the hotel. The following morning, we had to go sit through a timeshare presentation (yes, that's why it was such a cheap trip!). We kept saying "no" to the timeshare people and finally got back our $40 deposit and future vacations out of it (4 days, 3 nights in Puerto Vallarta and 3 days 2 nights in Las Vegas). Then, we decided to go to the beach for the rest of the day. We ate at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. right on the beach and then just laid out and relaxed by dipping in the super warm, clear water.

The following day, we slept in and ate at the hotel. Then, we drove to West Palm Beach, where we boarded our cruise ship, the Bahamas Celebration. We had fun eating and lounging around. I sang karaoke (of course!) that evening and we saw a great show on the ship.

When our ship pulled into the port on Grand Bahama Island, it was soooo hot! The weather is so different out there than in San Diego. It's truly tropical. San Diego is a tropical wannabe desert! We chose to go snorkeling for our excursion. I'd never been and we had to take a boat out about 2 miles or so to the reef. We got in and there were tons of beautiful tropical fish. Black and yellow, black and white and even a baracuda creeping around down on the bottom! I wish I could have gotten pictures of it....maybe next time!

After the snorkeling adventure, we pulled back in and had some lunch at a little dive. I had a club sandwich and Ibis had fish and chips. We had to get some ice cream because it was so darn hot! We walked over to a public beach (at least I think it was a public beach....we didn't get stopped, so it must have been!) and dipped in the water. I, of course, got fried being out in the sun for so long that day in such intense heat. I couldn't even lay out on my towel, so we just swam in the ocean for a couple of hours.

We then went souvenir shopping; got a couple of cute dresses for Marli and myself, a necklace for Mia, an outfit for Ian, and a couple of other things for family members. Then, back to the ship!

We had a wonderful meal that night after we napped on the ship. We saw another show and Dario Gaucho (the performer who used real gaucho stones) called Ibis up on the stage with him. Pretty hilarious! I'll have to figure out how to post the video.

The next day, we disembarked and drove to Orlando, FL. All along Florida's Turnpike, there were billboards exclaiming "Stop Here!" "Get Discounted Theme Park Tickets!". Well, we had to stop! We go into the place after about an hour of seeing these signs all along the road and the lady says that we can get $3 off each of our theme park tickets just for stopping in. This was on Thursday and we had all day Friday to go to a park. We decided to go to Islands of Adventure, the Universal Studios secondary park. Since we live in Southern California, we have Universal Studios, Disneyland, San Diego Zoo, Wild Animal Park, SeaWorld, and so forth. So, we chose to either do Busch Gardens in Tampa, or Islands of Adventure in Orlando because we don't have anything like them really. She then said that we could get $30 off each ticket if we go sit through ANOTHER timeshare presentation on Friday morning at 7:30. We said, no thanks. Then, she said, "you know, I can get them for you for free if you go." So, we said YES! That means that we saved $85 per person just for sitting through another presentation.

On Friday, we girded up our loins and went to the presentation full-on ready to say "no" to this resort ownership opportunity. They lowered the price SOOOO much that we were seriously tempted. We held out, though and in the end did NOT walk away owning a vacation resort. Whew! We did, however, agree that when the time does come to buy at a resort for a timeshare, Orlando would be the place to do it. It is the #1 family vacation destination in the world, due to all the theme parks and beaches close by. That would be good for when we wanted to trade out to go to other resorts. This particular resort was beautiful! This was the 4th one of these things we've done and it was, by far the best one! It was called Mystic Dunes Resort and it had a championship golf course as its main attraction.

That evening, we went to Downtown Disney (which is 10 times bigger than ours here at DLand). We ate at Portobello's Restaurant and had a wonderful meal. We walked around with our ponchos on getting soaking wet and had a great date. They had a million little Disney shops and a very cool art gallery with all kinds of Disney art. That had to be the coolest shop of all. There were a couple of paintings of little children with their Disney stuffed animals and Ibis really, really liked those. I'll have to remember that for a future gift. :)

Moving on to the theme park on Friday. Total blast! We rode on every ride twice practically since it had been pouring the night before and there were very few people in the park. The absolute coolest thing about this trip, in my opinion, was the Harry Potter section of that park. We were there just 2 weeks after it opened! I was so stoked to be there and go on the coolest rides ever. I had a butterbeer (cream soda with a butterscotch topping) in a souvenir mug and walked through Hogwarts Castle and Hogsmeade Village. Super cool.

After we left the park, we went to a Steak n' Shake (Ibis had never been to one) and had burgers, fries and shakes. Yummy! After our tummies were full, we got back to the hotel and flat out CRASHED!

Our flight left on Saturday at 3:45 and we had a layover in Dallas, TX (on purpose!) so that we could go to dinner with Erin, Curtis, Reagan and Ian. This was the first time meeting little Ian and he was such a doll!!!! Reagan is such a big girl now! It was fun being with them and eating yummy bbq.

Of course, all vacations have to end. :( So, we headed back to our busy lives in San Diego on Saturday evening and can't wait to go on another vacation really soon!!!

Here's to Cancun in December!! :)