Birthday Breakfast

Happy Birthday, Ryan!

This year was a little crazy, with Ryan's birthday being just 3 days before the Spring Festival that I'm in charge of. I know that Ryan was okay to not celebrate until after the Festival, but I had to do SOMETHING for him on his real birthday.

Since there was Pack Meeting the night of his birthday, I decided to skip a regular cake and instead celebrate at breakfast time with a quiche-type cake. I of course came up with this idea at 11:00 the night before, and I started to get discouraged while looking through recipes. Most called for cottage cheese or cream or other ingredients I didn't have on hand. But I was lucky enough to find a recipe that uses Bisquick, and so all was well!


I think Ryan was surprised to see a breakfast cake when he came downstairs that morning. And the boys thought it was pretty cool, too. We did learn not to stick candles in a warm quiche -- all the wax melts off the bottom of the candles!

Ryan had some presents to open when he and the boys got home from pack meeting -- a new battery and some new grilling items.

birthday wishes on the phone

the boys got a little crazy waiting for Dad to get off the phone

We celebrated the Saturday after his birthday by going on a date. He took me to his favorite type of restaurant -- Thai food. I had never been before, and I enjoyed my first tastes of Thai! We also went "window shopping" for couches and entertainment centers for our soon-to-be-finished basement.

Pie in the Face

Inspired by our leftover Easter dessert, Ryan initiated a pie-eating contest for our Family Home Evening activity this week.

It was a huge hit with the boys!!

notice the lonely piece of pie in the front there . . . I chose to eat mine with a fork after the competition ended :)

Joshua was the only one who remembered to keep his hands behind his back the whole time

Benjamin held his own for such a little guy!

This picture is totally going in the wedding video in 13 or so years!

Easter

Saturday morning our ward had a pancake breakfast and Easter egg hunt. Despite the cold weather, everyone had a great time. The eggs were divided into sections based on ages. I stayed with Elizabeth, so I didn't get pics of the boys.



Elizabeth was so excited about the first egg that she just stood there and held it while watching everyone else. But I showed her to pick up more, and then she got really into it. She also had fun carrying around her bag of eggs! (All Easter decorations are in the back of the cold storage room -- too hard to get to with the basement construction, so our kids got to use grocery bags this year!)



Easter was a nice family day. The kids had fun in the afternoon creating their own egg hunts with all of their plastic eggs. We don't make a huge deal of the Easter bunny, but I had to take a picture of the boys in their matching pajamas (Elizabeth got some non-matching ones, too). Every child also got a plastic mug with their name on it (Benjamin already had a mug, so he got a huge bouncy ball) and a book.

ready for our Hawaii vacation this summer!

Texture and Trim

The basement is starting to look like a part of the house!

This week they've been putting the texturing up. In fact on Tuesday night while I was up late making a birthday cake, I could hear them in the basement until 1am trying to get done!



Friday the finish carpenter started on all the moldings/trim and will be back on Monday to finish that and install shelving in the closets.


It will be done before we know it!

Benjamin's Favorite Place

Benjamin's journal assignment for homework this week was to write about his favorite place. I laughed when I read his scattered thoughts:

April 19

Maui

My favorrite place is Hawii Maui. They definitely have a ocean there. A milleun times, I could have drouded, hopefully my uncul cris saved me. They have a shuger cane train. I love Maui!

He had a hard time focusing to do this work! Can you tell? I don't remember Benjamin having to be saved by Uncle Chris or even coming close to drowning once!

A "Toad"-ally Fun Birthday!

Last week, my brother Sam had a break from BYU-Idaho and was able to come down and spend time with us! He did a lot of fun things with the kids (so I could work on Spring Festival) and helped in the yard, too. We loved having him here!


Joshua was sad that Sam couldn't stay for his birthday, so we decided to do our family celebration a little early while Sam was still here. Joshua chose to go to Pirate Island. We had fun eating pizza, getting balloon animals, and playing arcade games.


Joshua had a small friend party on his real birthday. He LOVES Super Mario Bros Wii right now, so we chose that as the theme. We kept it pretty simple because a) I'm not hugely creative when it comes to games and parties, and b) it's the last couple of weeks before Spring Festival and I'm really busy with that. I learned that simple for 5 year-olds is the way to go . . . not a lot of work for me, and they loved it!

The party started with doing some Mario Bros coloring pages that I printed off. They were enjoying this so much that I let it go almost 30 minutes, instead of the 10-15 I had planned.


Then Joshua opened his presents from his friends, followed by cake and ice cream. I had suggested Toad cupcakes (Blue Toad is his favorite character in the game), but Joshua was insistent that I make a cake because he wanted "to cut Toad up into pieces!"



Next we went out to the driveway for the pinata. I was amazed that they were able to bang it enough to get all of the candy out of the bottom, but the pinata itself stayed pretty much in tact! (See the picture where they are all picking up the candy . . . it's hard to tell the pinata was open.) Since there were only 4 kids, they each got a pretty good amount of loot to take home.





We finished the party by doing the only other thing there is to do at a Super Mario Bros Wii party: playing Super Mario Bros on the Wii!



Our family celebrated the evening of his birthday by eating more of the Toad cake and giving Joshua some presents: gumballs to refill his little gumball machine, a bike helmet that looks like a fierce shark, and a training-wheel bike.

this is a new "Happy Birthday" banner

Happy Birthday, Joshua!

Chessmaster

Nathan loves going to chess club once a week at school in the morning. Let me clarify: he loves going to chess club -- he doesn't love that it is early before school! He's been going now for about a year and a half.

Every year they have a chess tournament in the spring. Last year, as a first-timer and a second-grader, he got 9th place. This year his goal was to make it in the top 3. Hopefully, some of his reasoning was to show improvement/competing against himself to be better, etc. But I think his main reason was because the top 3 at the chess tournament get money!

The tournament was this past Friday. And the result is . . .

First Place!

Nathan and a 6th-grader tied as far as they each lost one game, but Nathan played harder players and so he won by a point or two.

He was a little upset that it was a gift card to a bookstore instead of cash, but since he is an avid reader, I'm sure he'll find something to spend it on!

So if Nathan ever wants to play you in chess, be prepared to lose!

Making Progress . . .

The basement is coming along!

We have a tub.

Everything has been wired to Ryan's specifications. (Benjamin's journal page for homework this week was about the basement. My favorite line was that there were so many wires that it might start a fire! So funny!)

canned light on left, bracket for speaker on the right

The insulation has been delivered and will go up on Monday.

Super Structures

We had a great Family Home Evening last night. In order to try to help there be a happier spirit in our home (and less whining), I gave a lesson about gratitude, using mostly President Monson's talk from the October Conference on Gratitude. We ended the lesson by introducing a contest to see how many "thank you's" or "I'm grateful for's" each person could get each day for the following week. The boys were excited about this, and were very polite and thankful throughout our activity! Hopefully this continues the whole week!

Benjamin prepared a fun activity that he had done in his G/T class at school last week: we made structures out of toothpicks and marshmallows. This was a welcome change from the activity the boys usually choose of playing the wii! Everyone had a lot of fun creating their structures.



This activity was such a success, that when Nathan and Benjamin got home from school, they chose to keep building instead of going out to play with friends. Nathan re-engineered his a little to make it stronger and bigger.



Elizabeth had been asleep for the activity last night, and was in heaven this afternoon when some of the structures got left on the table. I had already given her some out of the bag, but she was happy to keep eating . . . the toothpicks didn't slow her down too much! And now she has added "marshmallow" to her vocabulary :)

Conference Weekend

Here are some highlights from General Conference weekend:

* Our tradition: homemade cinnamon rolls; I halved the recipe this time and still ended up with almost 20 rolls!


* Beautiful weather for playing outside on Saturday

* I love this picture of how we kept Elizabeth happy for the last bit of the first session:

she's in the left corner of the pic, watching Mickey Mouse Playhouse on the portable DVD player

* Mom and the kids went to McDonald's for dinner on Saturday night

* Elizabeth found her new sandals and insisted that she put them on and wear them the rest of the day on Sunday -- she is a true girl and definitely loves shoes!




* The boys played Conference Bingo, and Benjamin also took some notes


* We had a great time listening to the words of our church leaders and spending time as a family!