Summer Cruisin' in the Caribbean

Our family took a 7-day Carnival cruise to the Caribbean for vacation this summer.  We had a blast.  The cruise left from Miami, FL so we arrived on Friday, and spent the night in South Beach before sailing on Saturday.  Friday night in South Beach is quite the spectical.  We ate Cuban food at "Larios", which is singer Gloria Estevan's restaurant.  The kids enjoyed trying Ceviche and Plantains.   As the clubs came to life, the people-watching got more and more interesting.  We all enjoyed the show.   Click on any photo to see it larger, or check out the link at the bottom of this entry for a more complete album of our trip.

We were aboard the Carnival Liberty, which is a relatively new ship.  This was the third cruise the kids have been on, and it was the longest, but the time went by quickly. 
The first port we visited was Cozumel, Mexico.  We took a ferry boat over to the mainland of Playa del Carmen, and took a guided tour of the ruins of Tulum.  It was raining, but fascinating.  Then we went to snorkle in a cave called Dos Ojos Cenote. http://www.cenotedosojos.com/photos.htm  There were stallagtites and stallagmites, and we had to have flashlights because part of the snorkeling was in a bat cave and it was very dark.

Next we stopped at Grand Cayman and took our newly certified scuba divers (Megan, Ryan and Cameron) for their first "real" dive.  They certified in Lake Pleasant, which was 60 degrees, wearing 7mm wetsuits, and having 5 ft. visibility.  Grand Cayman was 80 degrees in the water, wearing only swim suits, and having 250 feet visibility.  It was beautiful.  We dove with "Living the Dream Divers." http://www.livingthedreamdivers.com/  They were FABULOUS, and we highly recommend them, especially if you're taking kids.   As soon as the kids started to descend, there was a sea turtle cruising by.  They saw all kinds of interesting sea life, and the dive masters said they were great little divers.  The exact quote was "they must have had really good dive instructors."  We agree.  They learned at Academy of Scuba, in North Phoenix.  http://www.academyofscuba.com/  If you are looking for a great place to get certified, we recommend these guys!   It was so much fun to dive as a family.  It's something to which Mike and I have been looking forward for 20 years. 

Our third stop on the cruise was Jamaica; Ocho Rios.  Mike and Trish really enjoy visiting Jamaica, and have been there almost every year for the past 10 years.  The people are wonderful, and the place is beautiful.  We enjoyed giving the kids a taste of this fun place, by climbing Dunns River Falls, a huge waterfall that is a must-do when visiting Ocho.  We then went tubing in the White River.  Both, refreshing, fun activities.  This might have been the kids' favorite day.

We took our camera along to dinner each night in the dining room, so if you go by the photos, it appears that all we did on that ship was EAT!  We even tried some things we never would in Arizona such as deep fried alligator and shark.  We did take a pass on the frog legs.  And, although we did our share of dining... there were some great shows, and comedians, and the teenagers (and almost teen) loved the teen club activities and made lots of friends. 


When we returned to Miami, we had a few hours to spend until we caught our plane, so we went to see some of the sights where they film the USA series "Burn Notice."  We saw Michael's loft, and his Mom's house.

If you want to see more photos of the trip, here is a link to a web album. 
https://picasaweb.google.com/GardnerPix/CaribbeanCruise2011?authkey=Gv1sRgCNaFnue5yvG-Lw#

Graduation and Soul Food

 For Mike's Birthday, we took him to one of his favorite restaurants, "Lo Lo's Chicken and Waffles."  Evidently, Chicken and Waffles is considered to be "Soul Food" and, as you might expect, we were one of only 2 parties of Caucasian folks in the place.   We told the kids that it was good practice for Jamaica, because we will be a minority there, too.  The food was yummy, though.

Cameron's 5th grade graduation was very cute, and Megan even made the sacrifice to skip school that morning to attend.  Pretty wild to think the baby of our family is out of elementary

 school! 

Add caption



Busy Springtime

Life is busy around here. Cameron just finished 5th grade, and is heading to middle school. Ryan finished his Freshman year, and Megan finished her Junior year. Sometimes I forget to mention some of the fun things we do. Here is a quick recap of our Spring. We ran "Pat's Run" as a family. However, Ryan had a volleyball game that afternoon, and we had to cut the run short to make it to the game. Ryan is the only one of us who made it the whole 4.2 mile run, and into Sun Devil Stadium.

We also went, as a family, to the Kenny Chesney concert. Mike and Trish have seen Kenny several times, but it was a first for the kids. Uncle Kracker was one of the warm-up acts, and so was Billy Currington. A great concert out at the Jobing arena. (click on the pictures to see them larger).

Ryan's Volleyball

Hey guys! What's happening? Its Ryan here, I haven't talked to you guys in a while so let me fill you in! I have recently been on a YMCA volleyball team. We did alright, lost a couple, won a couple, and had a great time doing it. This last Saturday we had our last game of the season. We won the first game by a lot! The score was like 25 to 8 and I was on fire. The second game came and we were feeling good. I don't know what happened but that second game we just didn't play good at all. We lost around 25 to 12. Our last game we just couldn't return anything and ended up losing. We ended the season 3 wins to 2 losses. We still have a tournement coming up in a couple of weeks. I'm hoping we can get our act together and win the tournament.

Great season. It was a lot of fun!

Scuba Eggs

Hi this is Cameron your favorite Gardner of all. A few weeks ago for a family home evning I taught about Joesph Smith's first vision. For the activity we made Scuba Eggs. I found the craft online. What we did was dye a third of the egg on the bottom with egg dye. Once it dried we glued a clear bottle cap on it for the mask. Then we glued an about 5 inch bendy straw for the snorkle. Lastly we drew eyes on the mask and posed them for this picture.

(Far left: Cameron; Megan; Ryan; Dad; Mom)

First the eggs, next we will scuba dive for real!

California Girl

I am the most spoiled kid on the planet and I love it! Two weeks ago we had our school's spring break, and I got to spend it in Hollywood with my show choir. It was an amazing week full of celebrities and fun! And yes I said celebrities! We saw one celebrity every day but one. On the first day we saw Shannon Cook, a guy from some Canadian show. He was cute!

On the second day we went to Universal Studios, and we did a really cool VIP tour. We saw the prop closet, that wasnt really a closet at all... more like a prop university! It was huge! But on that tour we also saw the CSI LV crew filming and we saw Nick just walking by in costume. On the third day we were at Sony Studios, and we went on the set of Jepordy and Wheel of Fortune. All that color that we see on T.V. is all created by lights actually. The set is gray and silver, but the lighting makes it look awesome and bright. But as we were walking around the rest of the studio, we saw Andrew Garfield puttering around on a golf cart! For those who don't know who he is, first shame on you! But he was in the Social Network and he is the new Spiderman in the upcoming movie. Then we spent the rest of the day at the beach.

On Thursday we didnt see any celebrities, but we did walk past Johnny Depp's apartment! Does that count? On our last full day we went to The Grove, and as we were walking through, a random lady grabbed me and my friends and asked us if we wanted to be on Extra with Mario Lopez. And I mean, how could we refuse?!? She put us right up front! We just had to sit there and act like we were interested in what he was saying. My director said she would pay one of us to make a weird face on camera. None of us were brave enough to! Some other fun things we got to do was go on the set of Central Perk from Friends! They kept it up for tourists to take pics with. And for those that watch the new series, Pretty Little Liars, we saw Spencer, Hannah, Aria, Emily and Toby's house and the school. All the girls in my show choir were freaking out!

Great trip. I think I am destined to be in Hollywood some day! :)

Annie Warbucks

Hello blogsters! Megan here. And it probably won't surprise anyone, but I just finished another show! Shocking I know! I think that is what the majority of my post's on here have been about... Ha ha! Well anyway, I just finished the show "Annie Warbucks". And no, this isn't your classic, The sun will come out tomorrow show. Oh no... this is the sequal!

This show picks up right where Annie left off, Christmas morning. Annie has just been adopted by Daddy Warbucks and everything is happy and peachy! Right? NO! Enter New York City Commisioner of Child Welfare, Harriet Doyle (Me!). She breaks the news, that becuase Mr. Warbucks is not married, he cannot leagally adopt Annie. So she helps set him up with tons of women, trying to get him married. While all the time she is secretly trying to set him up with her daughter.

Lots of drama and funny jokes happen, all ending in my character getting arrested and Daddy Warbucks marrying Grace Farell. For my character, I had to wear a wig. A brunette wig. I looked so different! And the good part is that it only fell off once in a dress rehearsal! Whoo! This was definetly in the top 10 of my favorite shows. From the cast to the script to the music, every little bit was amazing!

Our Christmas Lights - 2010

Here are our outside Christmas lights this year. Just documenting our decorations; click on the photos to see the exceptional detail. One of these years we are really going to show up the neighborhood...

The cat has decided that she likes relaxing on the couch closest to the tree. It hasn't been cold enough for her to grow a winter coat, so she is staying inside most of the time.

The Grinch!

In an effort to keep the Gardners culturally well-rounded, we went to see the

Broadway musical; "The Grinch who Stole Christmas" at Gammage. It was great! The music was fun, the actors were incredible. The guy who played the Grinch is the actor who was "Robbie Rotten" in the show "Lazy Town." (A TV reference for those of us with young children). Everyone had a great time, and it put us in the mood for Christmas!

Scuba for All !!!!!

We got a great deal on SCUBA lessons, so we had our kids get certified. They aced the written part (which was the tough part for some of us) and had a great time in the pool. The instructors said Ryan could pretty much be a dive master at this point; it was all very easy for him. Megan had a persistent head cold and couldn't clear her ears properly during the weekend training, and Cameron had some challenges clearing her mask underwater, so the girls went back for extra pool sessions. The bad thing is, now it is too cold to do their checkout dive in Lake Pleasant, so we'll have to do that when it warms up, or take a trip somewhere warmer. Then, we can start planning family dive trips! We are super proud of our kids, especially since we didn't even ask them if they wanted to get scuba certified.... we just told them they were going to do it.

Volleyball!

Hello everybody! Its Ryan here and I am going to tell you about my recent volleyball tournament. On the 6th of November our YMCA volleyball team, the Attack Pack, went to the semi-finals championship game. Our first game started out kinda scary. We were down 18 to 5 and I was sitting out. We were missing easy points that we should have gotten and I wasn't sure if we were going to win. When I was put back in we got more aggressive. We came back and won that game and the next one, too. YEAH! On to the Finals!

Our game for the championship was one hour after the semis, against a team we hadn't played before. We had some downtime to watch the team we were going to play. They had excellent servers and one kid had a great spike! We were kind of scared but we had a better record than them, so we were kind of confident - maybe too much so. In the first game of the finals we were surprised to see how well they played. We lost a bunch of points in a row to their serving. At the end of that game we lost, the score was 25 to 18. Our confidence fell and we were scared that we would have made it this far but then lose it right at the end.

When we got back to playing our serving took over; one girl on our team would always bounce the ball off of the ground for a really long time before serving. At one point, I looked to the referee and saw him roll his eyes because of her bounces. We got many good volleys and it was quite fun. We won the second game, but just barely. The final score was 25 to 23, too close. For the third game we played to 15 points. It was now or never. We got really pumped and just took over the game. Next thing you know it was 14 to 6, game point for us. I was up to serve and was really nervous that I would mess it up. I got a good serve that barely went over the net. They jumped at it but couldn't return it. We were the champions!! Afterwards we got doughnuts and had a great time. My dad, our coach, thinks this was the greatest comeback in YMCA Volleyball history. We thought about changing our name to the Heart Attack Pack because the games were so close.

A Christmas Story

Once upon a time, in the far away land of Ahawatukee, Megan started a new show. OK so the first part is a little dramatic, but I really am in a new show. Well... not really new. It is "A Christmas Story." This is the classic story of Ralphie Parker and his persuasive techniques to get a new BB gun for Christmas. Its a cast of 10 people, and I play his Mom. I really do get to put soap in his mouth, we really do have a leg lamp, and it really will be amazing. I am the only teenager in the entire show, but it is so much fun! There are three adults, the Dad, the Narrator, and Ralphie's teacher Mrs. Sheilds. Then me. There are also two little girls, who are so cute. They are playing added characters to help keep the show moving nicely. The rest of the cast are four little boys. All energetic. The shows go up on the same weekend as my 17th birthday, December 3, 4, 5. Friday at 7:00, Saturday at 2:00 and 7:00, and Sunday at 2:00. Tickets are $15.00. I can't think of a better way to spend my birthday than doing what I love, performing.

Pavers!

Hello, this is Cameron. So a couple of months ago we got a new car. Our driveway was too small we decided to add more to it. On Veterans Day weekend my whole family dug out all of the dirt and rocks. The next day Megan and Ryan had to go to school (I think they just wanted to get out of some work) so me, my mom, and my dad built the driveway. While my mom and dad were laying the bricks I was “Brick Girl.” I got to unload all of the bricks from two of our cars and bring them to my parents. It was hard because, we had two different size bricks and the cars were far from where I was carrying them. I also carried big bags of sand that weighed 60 pounds a piece. It was quite a workout! We had to go to Home Depot about 6 times. Like my dad always says “you can’t ever complete a project without going to Home Depot more than once.”

Vroom Vroom!

We dragged the kids out to NASCAR at PIR again. It was supposed to be chilly, but it was really HOT. I think we all got sunburned. Carl Edwards won, so Trish was happy. Here is a little video of the gang at the race.

Sign of the Times

The family went to watch Cameron at a Gymnastics performance, and while we were waiting for it to start, we realized that each person was busy with their own personal communication device.

Desert Vista High School Football Rocks!

Gotta love high school football! (And the fact that our kids will still sit with us at a game!)

Nascar in Vegas

Hawaii 2010

We climbed Diamond head... sometimes it was raining on us.

Byodyo temple. Mike, Megan and Cameron got shot by an airsoft sniper in the bushes.

Mike ate his first Loco Moco ever. He said it " broke da mout. "