Birthday Party

My first born turned 11 years old last week. My how time is flying by. He chose a laser tag party to have with some friends at Laserquest. Just some info for you if you ever decide to have a party there yourself...you have to have a minimum of 8 people for a party, and everybody gets to play 2 games and you get a tiny party room to have cake in. They provide you nothing for the party except the room and saving $1 off the cost of two games for everyone, oh and a sign that says Happy Birthday to the birthday child. But, no plates, napkins, silverware for your cake, or drinks. They did pass out game passes for the guests for buy one game and get a second free which was nice, but they expire in less than 2 months. Oh well...all of the boys had a great time, so I'm glad for that.

 The cake I made Evan was simply two square cakes and I frosted them to look like Lego blocks. The connectors were jumbo marshmallows we had that I cut in half and frosted. Evan decided he wanted to add some of his Lego people to the cake.

Field Day

Our YMCA homeschool PE class had field day today. It started off with the kids being able to paint a bowl from Color Me Mine. I think they get to pick them up next week after they have been taken back to the shop and fired in a kiln. Then we headed outside for a 50 yard dash, egg/spoon race, 3 legged race, trivia contest, trying to get the teachers wet with water balloons, a wet sponge relay, and tug of war. After that the kids got to play in the sprinklers for a little bit and then we headed inside for a potluck lunch. 

The teachers had divided the kids into teams by colors ahead of time. Evan and Lauren had to wear blue shirts for their team.

Lauren (in the red cap) talking with her partner ready for the 3 legged race.

I am not sure how this tied in with the trivia game, but each team had to have 2 volunteers to get a "pie" in the face and Evan volunteered.

Didn't get a front shot of his face, but it's covered with the "pie".

Everyone lined up for the 50 yard dash.

This is not all of the students, but quite a few of them.

Everyone received certificate of achievements.

Look Ma, No Training Wheels!

We went to take a walk around our lake last night and Lauren wanted to try to ride her bike without training wheels. The ONLY other time we have tried no training wheels was last August just on our cul-de-sac and yard and it didn't go very well. We agreed, so dad took off the training wheels. There was a lot of swerving at first, and learning how to use her bike's brakes, we had to keep reminding her to look ahead at the road not down at her bike wheels, and big brother would ride ahead of her and encourage her to follow him. There were also a few times of her saying she couldn't do it, and stopping for breath, but we told her she had to keep trying. It takes us about 30 minutes to walk around our lake, so she had plenty of time to keep practicing and in the end she did it--successfully! Today she wanted to get back on her bike and try again, so I was able to videotape her. She is so proud of herself, and the rest of us are very proud of her also! (Remember to pause my playlist above so that you can hear the video).

Watercolor Nails

Do you like my nails? I found a tutorial on how to do something called sponged gradient nails from a site called layniefingers.blogspot.com and wanted to try it. However, my nails didn't come out at all like the tutorial's but I think I know what happened. At the time I wanted to paint my nails, I didn't have access to my computer to look up the tutorial to make sure I knew what I was doing, so I did what I could remember. I think when I striped the pink, blue, and purple polish onto my makeup sponge, I globbed it on too much, so when I went to sponge on my nails it kind of all smeared together. Instead of pretty blended stripes like the tutorial showed, I got more of a tye-dye look. However, when I think of tye-dye I think of more rainbow colors, so since these colors were pastels, it reminded me more of a watercolor painting, so that is how I named this watercolor nails. Even though it didn't come out how I wanted it to, I got a lot of compliments on how pretty my nails looked.

My thumb--this is the nail I really thought looked like a watercolor painting

My little pinkie nail

The nail on the left is the closest to the look I was trying to achieve from the tutorial. I was going for a striped look, and this finger came out the closest to my goal, except you can see that some blue polish blended into the pink polish a little.

Look What We Made: Paint Chip Easter Egg Garland

I know this is a late post, but I still wanted to post it. For Easter I had the kids make an Easter egg garland out of large paint chip cards to go on our fireplace mantel. I got the original idea from here. I think the only thing we might have done differently from this site is our paint chip cards might have been a bit larger, and we didn't double hole poke the top of the egg for threading the string through. We just loved how this came out!

The first step was to have Hubby bring home about 20 paint chip cards from the home improvement store. I asked him to pick out 10 different colored cards in pastel colors--blues, greens, pinks, yellows, oranges, purples--and then grab two cards in the colors he chose. He did a great job!

For the next step, I simply found an egg image on the computer, blew it up to the size we needed, printed two copies, the kids cut that shape out and then used it as a template to trace onto the backs of the paint chip cards. I recommend tracing on the back of the paint chip because that way when time comes to cut out the egg, if little hands can't quite cut on the line, you don't have the pencil marks showing on the front of the paint chip. After all of that, we used our hole punch and made holes at the tops of the eggs for weaving the yarn through.

Lauren tracing her egg template.

Evan cutting out his traced egg.

Hole punching time.

Didn't they turn out nice?

Once all of that work was done, we laid all of the eggs down on the floor and put them in different orders until we found the line up that we thought was the prettiest. Then we weaved some yarn in and out of the holes to link all of the eggs together. I bet if we had double hole punched the eggs like in the original tutorial I saw they probably wouldn't have flopped around so much--we could always go back and add another hole next year if we wanted to. Once the eggs were all stringed together we noticed that the paint names on the chip cards were noticeable, and we were going to have to be fine with that until Son came up with a great idea to solve the flopping around problem and hide the names on the paint chip cards--double stick tape. Brilliant!

Didn't this turn out absolutely adorable?! And it looked so nice on our mantel. (I can't believe I didn't get a pic of it on our mantel! What was I thinking--or rather I wasn't thinking, huh?)

We also displayed some other Easter items on our mantel. Daughter had some stuffed bunnies she wanted to put up there, and the kids built some cute houses from kits I picked up at Michaels.

Yes, we do know what Easter is REALLY about--Jesus rising from the dead. Because of that, I love celebrating Easter more than I do Christmas. But, there is just a part of me that also loves the secular tradition of the Easter bunny, pastel colors, egg hunts, and the season of spring that brings new life in nature after a dead season of winter. So, I love to have reminders of all of that around me at this time of year. All of this sure did puts smiles on our faces.