JellyBeans Anyone?

I have some serious hot glue gun skills and can't stop staring at my fabulous new wreath.

Dance Party at My House

We are part of the greatest Date Night/Babysitting Swap around. There are four families and we try to have 2 nights a month in which we all drop off our kids at one house, while the other 3 couples can go on a date. We've been doing this with the same families for 3 years now. It started with 8 kids, when Henry was the baby of the group, and has now grown to 11. Since our house is by far the smallest of all, we have to get pretty creative in the winter to keep the kids entertained. The last few times that we have been on the babysitting end I think we have had a ton of fun. Our night included a rockin' dance party. It started because our neighbor (who is not 2) has now figured out just how close he lives and sometimes decides that he wants to go home. I turned on the music to distract him. He loves to dance and loves Wyatt, so I lured him away from the door with my sweet moves.

Next thing you know we are joined by the whole crowd, and they were bustin' out everything they had. Just a little taste of what you can catch at my house. I love love love watching these little kids dance, they are so hilarious and actually have some amazing moves when they forget that anyone is watching.

Does he look distracted? Well, at least he wasn't trying to get out the door... and I did try to feed him dinner so that he didn't have to eat the blanket. He just likes it.

The girls who actually take dance lessons spent their time on the couch making crowns for all of the girls out of Flexeez. I was very impressed.

Our Family Rules

I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and had originally thought that I would copy some ideas that I saw online (here). But after some creative brainstorming, I realized that I wanted something a bit more classic that could fit perfectly in my current home and the homes of the future that I imagine that we will have. I did a rough layout and then went to Stacy's to cut the vinyl, and just did my best to make things work and get it all cut out. When I finally got home and put it all together, I realized I have more space for more things. I like that since we will be able to add to it as our family evolves.

Not to be too prideful, but I am pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Just because I thought this picture was cute... they hardly even look like each other.

What I want to be

Gavin and I were doing his homework last week and the theme for part of it was occupations. We had some funny conversations about what jobs our neighbors had, there is a lot of diversity in the people we know and the ones that he knew right away were not who I would have expected. He was also amazed to find out what it meant to volunteer. I guess he didn't realize that people get paid to do just about anything. The best part was when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up-

G- "No one has asked me that. I better think about it."
Me- "Well, you can be anything you want. Is there something you want to do?"
G- "I know. I want to be in the Olympics."
Me- "Cool, So you want to be an athlete?"
G- "What's an athlete?"
Me- "Someone whose job is to play a sport."
G- "No. I want to be in the Olympics, so that when one of the athletes get hurt, I am the guy that goes to help them and tells them what to do to play better in their sport."
Me- "Hmm, So you want to be a Sports Trainer? You have to learn about how the body works like doctors do and also how different sports are played."
G- "Yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. I'll be a Sports Trainer."

I was pretty surprised that he had ever noticed the trainers that help the injured athletes, but apparently that stuck with him. I guess we'll see how that pans out.:-) Sometimes my conversations with my kids just amaze me.

The Webkinz Party

Yesterday, we packed in all of the possible birthday fun with a Webkinz birthday party. Since this isn't a well established theme for a birthday, we had to make up more of the decor and games ourselves. Turns out that is a good thing, it was pretty inexpensive and pretty easy to pull off. Since Webkinz are just stuffed animals at heart, we used mostly animals for everything we did. Each of the kids brought their favorite Webkinz or stuffed animal, which turned out to be good on many levels. We had quite the crowd, so while kids were waiting for their turn at a game, they would play with their animals. Pretty handy.

A glimpse at our fun.
Gavin and his new Webkinz.

The brownies.

The spread- Zoopals plates and cups never fail.

At Gav's suggestion, I even created some Webkinz wrapping paper.
The party favors- some animal stickers, airheads, a tiny bean bag animal and a random sports whistle.
Then the Games-
Pin the Tail on the Webkinz... ours was a dalmation.

Don't Eat Wacky... (modified version of Don't Eat Pete). Claire was quite nervous about participating, what a good mom helping her.

The latest Webkinz craze... Gem Hunting at the Curio Shop. There was no pick-axe, just looking under 'rocks' for gems (polished rocks) or slag (gravel from the driveway).

And a good little guessing quiz game... no one really got close, but they seemed to have fun trying to think of a high number.

I made individual brownies, it was much less messy than cupcakes, and no drawn out discussions with Gavin about his aversion to strange colors of frosting etc.

Wrap up the fun with presents and playing with stuffed animals. What could be better?

Happy 6th Birthday Gav!

Today my little man turned 6. The first Cardon boy of his generation, and what a great big brother he is. He has spent the last few years keeping me on my toes and constantly amazed. He wants to know every detail of information about everything, and he just soaks it all up. Suddenly he reads and helps the little kids and races around on both feet and bike, and calls people on the webcam, and ties double knots. It's just so amazing to me. He started out as this tiny little bundle that we had no idea what to do with, and even though we still have no idea what to do with him, he is great at giving us his opinion of what we should do and when. He is really becoming my little friend.

At Age 6, he is officially 4 feet tall and about 50 lbs. He is so stinkin' handsome and I really love that his curls seem to be coming back now that he wears his hair a bit longer.
Here is where we started. (i love the trip down memory lane, just appease me.)
Then 2.
Then 4.
And now 6.
What a great journey we are on. I hope he looks back at it with as much happiness as I do.
Great pictures of the ultimate Webkinz birthday party to come soon.

Playground Fun

We really love warmer spring days when we can play outside, especially when friends join us at the playground. I really enjoying watching these kids all play together, even if they do try to totally beat me at P-I-G.

Who Needs a Puppy?

Not us. We've got Wyatt.

Spring Showers

Last week we were sunning ourselves and playing on these... without jackets.

Then yesterday we woke up to this.

Welcome Spring, we are ready for all of your strange surprises.

Two of a Kind

I took a few shots of these two crazies before church on Henry's birthday.

This is what happens when I tell them to hug.

They make such a pair these days. They love the same things, love playing together and love protecting the house from Wyatt, and they"ll do just about anything for a laugh.

The Lego Party

Henry's first birthday party with friends was a fabulous Lego ordeal. Even though I had some high stress moments getting ready, mostly because of my procrastination, it was super fun. The fabulous Rena came over to help me, and I don't know how it would have gone without her. I have to say that it was just about perfect- the right length of time, right number of activities, great kids and the right number of those too.
We started out with some coloring of Lego characters.

Then we played a hilarious and boisterous game of "Lego, Lego, Whose got the Lego?" There was so much laughing and silliness, perhaps this was the most entertaining party of the party. I got them all in the circle and then took Henry out to be it, Rena later admitted that she had never played "Whose got the button?" that this Lego game was based on. Whoops, good thing she is such a good sport. She got them all going without even knowing what the game was.
These 3 were laughing so hard for most of the game. Pretty funny.
About halfway through, Henry decided he would rather sit back and watch.
I found a great game of Lego memory to play, and we split into 2 groups so no 4-year olds would get totally overwhelmed trying to remember how to find a match. They did great.
And finally the much anticipated Lego pinata. Try not to look too closely at the photo. Making this pinata turned out to be quite an ordeal, but the kids loved it. We even taped up the bottom and used it again with the cousins that night.

At the end of the party, the kids spent a few minutes building with our Lego collection and just playing with Henry's presents. The seemed super excited about that part.
This was about as creative as I got with the cupcakes, but the kids really liked them.
Gavin was put in charge of making the Lego head plates. I thought he did a pretty great job.

For party favors, we made these fun little Lego boxes with a template that I found. We added a Lego guy and Lego stickers for the boys and Littlest Petshop animal and stickers for the girls (since girl legos are nearly impossible to come by).

It was a very fun party, and I have a feeling that I may have set the expectations a little high for the next party. Oh well, we'll see how well I can do with that in a couple weeks.