A Date with Roller Skates

A couple of Saturdays ago was Lydia's birthday party at Skate World. It was so fun! Every kid that she invited was able to come (a first for her parties--usually someone's sick or busy or gone) and they all had fun skating. Lydia was a little scared at first. She didn't want to let go of the wall because she was afraid of falling, but eventually she gained a little more confidence and had some fun. She only fell eight times, she told me, so that was pretty good. Her little friends were so cute--some had never skated before and fell quite a few times, but got right back up. We had our party "area" for 45 minutes where we ate hotdogs, cotton candy, root beer and chocolate cake. Then Lydia opened her presents. By this time the kids were ready to get back out and skate.

It was SO NICE to not have to plan anything (except the cake) and then just show up and have everything ready to go. Why didn't I do these kinds of parties earlier? :)

Blake, Lydia and Jake hanging onto the wall!

Time to eat!

Rollerskating Cake

Opening gifts. Some of her friends: Blake, Rayden, Lyd, Taijah and Jake

More friends: Elise, Riley, Maggie and Paige

Bella after her share of cake!

Most of the gang

Done with skating!

# 7

Happy Birthday Lydia!!!

This morning our beautiful Lydia turned 7!!! We are going out tonight to celebrate as a family, and then she's having her friend birthday party on Saturday. She's been dying to go to Skate World for her birthday ever since she went to her friend's skating party earlier this year. She doesn't know how to skate very well, but she sure had fun last time. I'm excited about it--I went skating for my 8th birthday party and it was a blast. So, we're going to have a good time!

We are so grateful that Lydia is part of our family! She is so fun and full of life. She's crazy and determined, smart and funny. She makes us laugh everyday and we love her so much!

School Project

In the 4th grade, Maggie is learning about Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. In class they are doing all sorts of activities relating to Native American life. They've made bead necklaces, made head dresses, they had to write a myth about how an animal got one of it's features or how something came to be. Next week they are having a potlatch, which is a celebration with songs, stories and dance that celebrate many different. Maggie is participating as an eagle in a dance. I'm going to go watch it on Wed. and will post more pictures. So, along with these activities, the students were asked to create a Native American village at home. Garrett and Maggie worked on it for about a week and created a fantastic scene. Here are some pictures:

This is the daughter and mother (made of clay and kind of hard to see) preparing food. the daugther is collecting berries and the mother is cooking fish.

This is the eagle soaring above the long house, the totem pole and the waterfall and snowcapped mountains.

This is the father in a canoe trying to kill a seal.

This is a bear catching a fish at the river.

More of the waterfall, trees (with real tree branches) and mountains

This is looking inside the longhouse (with beds and a fire)

This is the totem pole.

Maggie with the finished project.

It's hard to see it clearly from the pictures, but they did a fantastic job, with tons of detail and a lot of hard work! Way to go guys!

Toothless Lydia

Lydia lost another tooth! Paige's friend Avery pulled it out. It was on accident. Lydia has a jumprope in her mouth and Avery pulled on the rope and out came the tooth. Lydia was surprised when it came out. This is the third tooth that she has lost. Check out her cute smile!

Spooky Halloween Party

I forgot to take pictures of us carving pumpkins and/or the pumpkins. But, here are pictures of us at our family Halloween party. We had a great time!

Maggie as a vampire princess

White trash Garrett who's stuck in the 80's

Our sad little clown...she was very hungry and didn't want to take pictures

Our regal Queen of hearts (I forgot to mention that I did chop her hair off--brushing out all the rats every morning and fighting her tears was too much!)

and our Beaver cheerleader

I went as a gypsy/fortune teller/Professor Trelawny (from Harry Potter)

We had our usual spooky dinner, except this time I made breakfast for dinner. We had swamp pie (an egg and sausage casserole), pumpkin flesh (cantaloupe), zombie scabs (bacon), Ogre eyeball soup (hot chocolate with marshmallows for eyes), lizard tongues (bananas), spider web surprise (cinnamon rolls) and owl hearts (strawberries). It was delicious!!


While Garrett and I cleaned up dinner and got Bella to bed, the girls did some Halloween activities like dot to dots and making words out of Halloween words and coloring pages.

Then we played a memory game. I showed them a tray of 21 objects and they could look at them for a minute. I took the tray away and they had to write down as many objects as they could remember. It was kind of hard. I even played even though I had gathered all the items; and I couldn't remember them all. My memory is awful anyway!

Then we played a few relay races. The first one was a feather race where they had to blow a feather across the floor with a straw. This proved to be more difficult than I thought. But, Garrett and Lydia won that one. Then we tried to see who could scoop out the most cotton balls out of a bowl in 30 seconds using a spoon. Garrett likes to not follow the rules and decided he was going to do it a different way:

by using his face and facial hair! What a nut! Then, he started this:

Our last game was a treasure hunt where they had clues that led to keys that led to a prize. They had to dig though a bunch of spiders to find a key, and then had to put together a monster:
Paige's monster--a mummy
Lydia's skeleton
They also had to search for a key in some whipped cream (that unfortuneatly melted before they got to it)
Garrett with his key

and Maggie loving the whipped cream!
The last thing they had to do is to decode a message telling them where their prize was hidden. Hopefully, they had a good time. I always have fun coming up with ideas and getting ready for it.
These two pictures are from Halloween night. Maggie's the only one that is a little different.

Garrett stayed home and passed out candy this year. I did it last year and really wanted to go out with the kids this year. It was a lot of fun. Bella absolutely loved walking around and carrying her pumpkin basket. She stood at the doors with the other girls and waited for her candy then said a quiet, Thank you. She was so excited walking from house to house. It was really cute. I put her in the stroller on our way home and she looked through her candy very excitedly pulling them out and wanting me to open them. She can say "candy" and has been asking for since she got back from Trick-or-Treating. She is such a big girl!

We always have so many trick-or-treaters and it is so fun and exciting! We ran out of candy again this year sometime around 8ish. I bet I had about 10 lbs of candy. I guess we'll have to get a little more next year!

Fun Halloween Decoration

I wanted to post this before Halloween, but never got the chance. I love Martha Stewart when it comes to Halloween, she has great ideas for decorations. A few years back, she had apothecary bottles with fun spooky labels. Of course, they are way too expensive in her store, but I really liked them. So I wanted to make them myself. I found a great blog that had some labels that you could print for free. I found them at the blog, the Idea Room (it's in my fun blogs section) and they had the link to the other blog that had them for free. His name is Johnny Love and his website is Love Manor. They were so fun! I just found a few cool jars at goodwill and then just found some other bottles around the house. I had Garrett spray paint the lids black and put fun things inside! It's now one of my favorite decorations!