Birthday!

It's been a busy month with JackJack's birthday. This naughty stinker has turned 3 with a vengeance!

Here is his last-minute, not-that-great pirate battle birthday cake. It looked great until the layers came to room temperature and started falling apart. Fortunately it was still delicious.

Draw Something

Possibly one of the most entertaining games ever. Stick figures are hilarious.

 Violet plays on her own account and her drawings are amazing.

The science of a birthday

You too can have a fabulous Mad Science birthday party by following these simple instructions.

1. The birthday girl. Find a daughter who turns up her nose at boring store-bought princess-themed parties (read: parties that are easy to pull off) and instead turns her crazy brain to thoughts of secret lairs and crazy potions and things that explode.

2. The invitation.We went with old-fashioned cartooney fun.

3. The decorations. I'll admit that it really really really helped that Joe spends half his day in a chemical lab (testing drinking water) and that the lab director is the nicest of human beings and let us borrow most of this stuff. Monica is the best!! But we found some educational science stores and websites where you can get most of this inexpensively.

The decorations were all safe and edible - candies and colored water and a Poison Your Neighbor's Drink station where you could put test tubes of punch into beakers of soda. Except that then the girls started putting the candies in their drinks and it really was poison.

4. The cake. Mad scientists love bright colors. It's a known fact.


5. The entertainment. We found the craziest of scientists to entertain a herd of sugared-up 2nd graders.

They explored the science of the digestive system and made ooey gooey slime blobs.

6. The explosions. We went with Diet Coke/Mento cannons.

Can you hear me now?

Dad? It's me, Smitty. I can't hear you very well. I'll squish it harder against my head.
Dad!
What's wrong with this thing. Dad! Are you there? Shaking stuff usually fixes it. Also tasting it.
It's true. I'm hilarious. Smitty's out. Peace!

Davy Crockett birthday party

Two birthdays down and one to go! Dash wanted a Davy Crockett-themed party. The invite:
The cake:

Why oh why did I not take pictures of the inside? It was dark chocolate cake with ooey gooey marshmallow buttercream (supposed to be like a campfire s'more, idea from Pintrest) and the milk chocolate frosting on the outside. Delicious. Totally delicious. And Bear Tracks ice cream. Keep the theme alive!

I told Joe he was in charge of the actual party and I would do food. He came through in a big way. We had a good old-fashioned mountain man rendezvous, complete with hatchet toss....
bow-and-arrow shooting...
stick-wrestling...
leg-wrestling...
and cute babies underfoot. Is that not what a real mountain man rendezvous is made of?
With each event they won pelts which they strung on a leather strap and turned in at the trading post for drinks and candy and stick-on mustaches. They also got to wrestle a barr (attack an angry-bear pinata) for candy.
It was hard to find a real angry bear at the party store.

Finally, when everyone went home, this is what they got for a thank-you.

A bit of my childhood

When I was little, my Grandma Bev had a record player that you could hear throughout the entire house. She had two records we could listen to - The Smurfs All Star Show and Urban Chipmunk (by The Chipmunks).

Grandma was so little that at 8 years old, I could easily wear her dresses and shoes. She had so many fancy cocktail dresses and lovely little heeled sandals and a box full of costume jewelry that we were allowed to wear. We would dress in the fanciest of outfits and whirl and twirl around to the sqeaky-vocals of country music. And, like most things that were fabulous when we were young, these songs are just as funny and catchy today. Violet and Dash have been dancing around to the music all morning.

Some people have all the luck

Yesterday I french-braided Violet's hair in pigtails for school.

Today I took them out. Voilà!

Instant perfect waves. They'll stay like this all day. I can't imagine what my hair would do if I tried this. Something not-cool, that's for sure. Something along the lines of this.

Or perhaps this. But, you know, without the intentional style factor.


Also my neck is not 17 feet long. But we can't have everything.

The space villian and the Spanish beauty

This year the kids did not want to dress up as a pair. One child wanted a licensed-character, out-of-the-box costume and the other... well... she had her own ideas. I borrowed this gorgeous flamenco dancer dress from a friend (we had a little bookclub costume exchange) and thought she would be so excited because the dress was all the way from Spain. Then she had herself a right little tantrum because apparently red is not pink enough and... well... I stopped listening. But after scouring all the costumes at the local Buy-and-Large and bribing her with a new red lipstick for her very very own, she mysteriously changed her mind.


And I'm glad she did. Because she was ever so lovely.

This was a birthday party outfit and instead of being a regular princess, she wanted to be a Halloween princess. Have I mentioned less than 5 million times how much I love her beautiful hair and how much fun I have doing it?

What am I thinking?

Brittany and I are going snowboarding.

I am kind of nervous. I haven't been snowboarding since before Bart (that's 5 long years for those who are keeping score.) If you have any prayers to spare today, maybe mention that I would not like to become injured or dead today.

Update: we have both returned un-injured and non-dead.

I love snowboarding and can't wait to go again! We had about 3 inches of powder, light snow and an almost completely empty resort. In the middle of the day we rode the lift to the tippy top for a twice-baked potato and the most chocolaty, indulgent, whipped-cream-with-cinnamon cup of hot chocolate. Totally fabulous.

Officially 4

You're pretty much not an official 4-year-old until you've fought crime and saved princesses whilst wearing a dishtowel cape. It's like a right of passage. Bart prefers the vintage flour-sack dish cloths. Because he rocks.