Catching up part 1

Curses! I'm way behind again! Part of the problem has been that our cameras are now permanent Chicago residents. That's right, they were left there when Chris and I went for our 10th anniversary at the end of April. Chris got a hold of the conference center that he left the cameras in, but they had not been turned in. But, lucky for us, my dad had just gotten a new camera for his birthday, so he let us have his old one. We still don't have a video camera, which is so unfortunate because we've missed Hudson's first wobbly steps, and him saying all his new words. *sigh* So, for some reason, the missing camera situation made me not want to blog. So, here goes my attempt at catching up with the last few months (minus May; we were camera-less for that month):

Birthdays!

Annie had a friend party this year, and she decided she wanted to do a Laura Ingalls/pioneer theme.

Making rag dolls

Pop the balloon game (supposedly in pioneer times they used pig bladders as balloons!)


Scavenger hunt for "old pioneer" things (old leather book, yarn, flowers, ect.)

Making soap (all this really consisted of was me melting chunks of soap and pouring them into molds, then letting the girls choose one to take home. I don't recommend this; it was sooo hard to clean up!)



The "quilted" birthday cake. A word about this: I don't really make fancy cakes, as you can see. I was getting stressed because I ran out of pink gel to make all of the quilt "stitches" before I even got halfway around the cake. Right as I was trying to figure out how I was going to get more gel when all the stores were closed, I decided that Annie was not going to care. . . and it was true. Even though it basically was just a rectangle cake with lots of gel patterns on it, there were plenty of oohs and ahhs from the girls.

Opening presents!! Happy 9th birthday Annie - you are growing up so fast I can hardly believe it. You are so beautiful and so sweet. We love you!!

Brigham's 4th birthday

It was Brig's turn to have a family party this year. I think most of you know that Brigham and Annie have the same birthday, April 7th. So we trade off every year, one has a friend party, and one has a family party. Brigham is so easy to buy for because he loves so many things - cars, play mobil, star wars, sports. The big thing he got was Noah's old bike (all cleaned up with new pedals). It took him awhile, but he's cruising around as fast as he can go with training wheels (which isn't so fast, but he loves it). Brig also decided he wanted to eat at Wendy's for his birthday dinner.


Here's his cake, just like he wanted - chocolate with chocolate chips, and all sorts of sprinkles all over. We love you so much Brigham! You're getting to be such a big boy and you're learning to do so many things on your own!

Preschool:

Here's one of the few pictures I took of our little co-op preschool. It was a small group this year, just these 4 boys: Logan Anderson, Gavin Shupe, Wesley Stelter, and Brigham. They cracked me up all the time. Any school stuff was finished at lightening speed so that they could get back to play time, which pretty much consisted of fighting with light sabers. Also, anytime I had them make a craft, one or more of the boys would somehow twist it around to create a light saber. Example: on beach day I make sand dough, which they could mold into any shape they wanted. I also had sticks and beads and such for them to stick in. Wesley announced that he was going to put a blue bead into his mound of sand dough and make it a light saber.