Gifts

I know I've mentioned about a 1,000 times how blessed we've been by skype, but it's because we are so thankful to be able to see our family. Going lots of years in between being able to physically hug our family is tough but skype makes a big difference.

I told my mom how convenient it was for them to send a birthday box for the boys in our family this year. (Not that we planned our family this way, but it does save on postage!) All the boys loved the things we received in the mail. We had such a great laugh with the magic tricks you sent, Calvin was amazed, even when he saw how they worked. What was particularly fun this year is that we had Calvin open his presents from my parents while Skyping with them, and my sister was even able to join them; it was like candy on cake. He particularly loves his new "Go Cats" shirt; it is immediately worn after it is dry and takes some coercing to allow me to wash it.


Micah loves his new fridge toy and he just finally figured out how to get the pieces in the proper place, he's pretty proud of himself. Thank you so much, it's given him something to do other than take everything out of the drawers he's not supposed to touch in the kitchen.

We were surprised to find yet another gift while waiting on the elevator last week I spotted an envelope that looked like it was from the US, and sure enough my sister sent the boys some birthday cards. Aunt Nat I'm not sure where you found Calvin's card but he LOVED it and loves his new pirate puppet.


If we don't have enough new things around our house we of course added our presents for the boys to the mix. Since Calvin's very into dressing up in his cape, and a high percentage of his day is spent as a superhero. I made him a few new superhero capes and masks, he was thrilled and it's been fun watching him transform into a hero who rescues princesses and saves the day.

For Micah we decided our littlest man needed some wheels, hopefully it will help keep a very active boy busy during the winter months, but for now our little dare devil is primarily using it as storage for anything and everything (the seat flips up), and as a stepping stool to reach objects out of his reach. We're trying to dissuade the latter.

I'm so thankful for the ability to love our kids through a few special things. Thank you Mom and Dad, and Nat for being so thoughtful. I hope our children find as much joy in giving someday as I do.

Soup, Soup, that tasty Soup, Soup

Calvin's getting adjusted to going to school every day. He's made a few friends and he's collects pounds of feathers and buckeyes from the playground. One area we still needed to make some progress was being a little more adventurous in the food department.


So I was delighted when his teacher suggested I come and eat lunch with him. I'm so thankful Marvin's office is so close to Calvin's school, it made it very easy to drop Micah off so I could eat lunch with Calvin without any distractions.


Luckily for me I was able to be a part of their group time before lunch. I was able to snap a few pictures as well.

Then we came face to face with his fear. SOUP. Once I raved about how amazing it was he dipped a bit of his beloved bread in, and low and behold, it was tasty.


In fact he ate most of his soup and when the second course came, the meat dish, he devoured it as well. The next time he ate lunch at school he told me as he was getting dressed to go home "I ate all my lunch today so now I won't be hungry anymore." I was wondering if he was even noticing he was hungry.


I'm so proud of him.

Now for something indirectly related, one of his classmates set the bar pretty high on their birthday and brought all the kids a bag full of goodies. So Calvin and I created a few robots for his classmates, apparently the kids were able to enjoy them as a little snack that day. It's always so hard to figure out what is cultural expected. I know for sure that all the vendors at the market where I bought candy from thought I was crazy, but a few thought it was clever.  I'm going with clever, rather than crazy.


I'm so thankful for a great class and for a few friends for Calvin.

My Hungry Little Caterpillar {the party}

Since you only turn one once, I convinced Marvin that Micah needed his own party. More work I know, but he's worth celebrating. I kept it simple, in fact I couldn't find some of the decorations the morning of his party and I tried to not be disappointed about that. (I found them the next day.)

I choose the Hungry Little Caterpillar theme, because it's Micah's favorite book. He loves it and it's the book he always pulls off the shelf, plops down and flips through. He loves all those little holes and pages that flip so easily.

We had our usually Sunday get together so a few others added to our meal, which was such a blessing.

Our menu consisted of:
Chicken Salad Sandwiches and a few PBJs for the kids.
Salad
Sliced Veggies
Watermelon, Apples, Oranges, Plums
Chips
Pickles

I'm sure all of you parents of small children can recognize which parts of our menu are from the book.

Of course we had cake. 1 big cake.

Thanks mom for the funfetti mix, it was perfect for this and the M&Ms the blue ones added a lot to this cake, also all the kids were very excited about eating candy with CAKE.

And a smash cake.

I only printed a couple dot to dot activity pages for the kids, in the spirit of going low key.

We brought out the cake, and someone was instantly interested.

We started singing, which really threw him off, but after the candle was out, boy was he excited.

He explored it a bit.

Then he discovered the delightfulness of sugar.

He dug in, but stuck mostly to the frosting.

We quickly ran a bath and removed the green caterpillar before it was tossed from his tray.


Our friends were so sweet to love Micah with a few presents. He's loving have a few new toys to the mix.


Lastly we handed out Micah's party favors, much to Calvin's delight.

I can't believe our little Caterpillar is ONE.
It's such a blessing to love on this little man.

The Traveling Gnomes

What fun family memories we created recently. We took part in not only one, but two fall parties this year.  
After a quick pinterest search on Friday evening, we found the perfect costumes, Gnomes. Perfect for a landscape designer!

Here are our little traveling gnomes. It was a pretty easy costume. I made Micah's shirt and both of the boys hats using this tutorial, and a couple of belts, Calvin's not wearing his in this picture, and voila some adorable gnome costumes.

***A small side note of thanks to my mom for bringing me some felt this spring. I could not have made these beards without it. Just one of the many uses I'm finding with the stack of felt you brought. THANK YOU!

Calvin wasn't so sure what to think of all the games, he was very quietly observing and semi participating in them, but he helped his team pull out the victory in an eating competition. He can dominate a cookie, that's for sure!

I'm so thankful for friends who love to help us create fabulous memories our kids will remember forever. I can't wait until next year, who knows what we will come up with.

The Zone

I just realized I never posted this.  Here's a little peek into the end of our summer.


We live near the border and there are certain places you can only access with a special border zone pass. This year our family was able to get passes, unfortunately we haven't been able to use them like we thought.

A couple months ago Marvin went hunting for some good camping spots in the zone. Unfortunately he discovered you need a better vehicle to travel very far into the zone. Since the only one we know with this type of vehicle recently fell into this river with it, we were out of luck.

Marvin also discovered we have some pine forests in our area. The majority of our mountains are pretty rugged with lots of rock and cliffs, so this was a fun surprise.

He saw some paragliders.

Made it up to an old campsite.

Our backdoor is pretty spectacular.

You should visit!

Yo Ho Ho

Our little pirate was SO very excited about his birthday party, and so was I. I love planning parties and told Marvin I'd love to do it as a job but only with a staff who could make all my ideas happen. Since that will never happen, I'll just enjoy planning my little guys' parties.

Since you couldn't make it here's a peek into what we did and a few of the details.


We had a full house in our little apartment. We had a total of 14 adults, 5 school age children 8 preschoolers and 4 babies in our apartment this past Saturday, yep that's 31 people in our two bedroom apartment. Since we had a full place I knew we'd have to keep things organized and utilize the playground outside for some games. Thankfully the weather was nice enough to do so!

As people arrived we had several activities for the children to stay busy with.
Dress up. We printed out some pirate hats and I sewed some elastic to a felt pirate eye patch that was free for the taking.

Make your own "spotting scope" as Calvin likes to call them.

Creating a pirate flag.

Treasure hunting.
I made an I spy bag for Calvin recently which worked great for this, but I ended up making another one out of an empty soda bottle for the party. For this activity I gathered small toys (several from Calvin's beloved kinder eggs), and then photographed them. I then cut open a soda bottle added the toys and taped it together with some packing tape. Next I filled it with rice (if you want it more permanent add some super glue to the lid). I printed off the pictures and had the kids hunt for the buried treasure circling the ones they found.

There were some various pirate printable coloring pages, along with pirate word searches and mazes for the older kids available to do.

After all our guests arrived we ate.
We enjoyed "Pirate Joes", fruit and veggie swords, salad and goldfish.

Then it was time for the treasure hunt. Marvin made a map and they needed to collect all the keys to open the treasure chest. This was a BIG hit, and it turned out to be more of an Easter egg hunt rather than a following the map activity. But they LOVED it and were the most excited about this game.

All the kids loved their treasure. I made little drawstring bags, printed off some coloring pages on the internet and sewed a few together for a custom pirate coloring book, we added some sweets and stickers, and boom we had a fabulous treasure to give out.

Next we played cannon ball war. We used crumpled computer paper for our cannonballs and the two teams had to throw the cannon balls to the other side, the team with the most cannonballs on in their ship was sunk and had to walk the plank.

Lastly we played sword tag, we made a soft sword and they had to use it to tag everyone making them frozen. Calvin's very into freeze tag at the moment so it was fun to incorporate this into the party.

We brought the cake down, sang happy birthday to our little pirate and were able to pass out cupcakes to all our neighbors who were outside playing or sitting outside. These cupcake wrappers were the way to go they made it very easy to give to our neighbors. It was fun for Calvin's neighborhood friends to share in his special pirate birthday too. We were thankful that most all of them were out that night.

After cake we headed inside to open presents. Then we let the kids watch the pirates who don't do anything which gave the parents some time to chat.

Marvin decorated the cake, didn't he do an amazing job!

It was so much fun. Of course I didn't have time to make everything I had planned on making but it was sure fun to see what I did have time for come together.

If you're curious, I printed the banners and cupcake liners from here
I made my own invite via photoshop elements.
I used this basic template for the food labels and added some words in Picnic.


I'm so thankful for printables, especially since we live in a place with zero craft supplies but I did score some fun pirate napkins and candles locally, so I guess we can find some stuff here.

We wish you could have been here.
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WFMW