TEN!!!

August 24 was our TEN year anniversary!  Woo-hoo!

I always struggle knowing what to get George for romantic occasions like this.  He still teases me for getting him two pairs of gym shorts for our first anniversary (what?  he needed them).  The problem is I'm a practical gift giver.  I wish I'd have seen these:

 Fits us perfectly!  :)  (If it fits you too, you can buy them here.)

Since I couldn't think of anything fabulous, I went with food.  Romantic, huh?  :)  I made the collage of all of our anniversaries (above) as a place mat for meals shaped like 10's.  Breakfast was a gogurt (the one) and a donut (the ten).  George thought it was really strange.

Then I packed a secret lunch (FIRST time that either of us can remember me making him lunch in TEN years - pretty sad, eh?) and this time he actually understood the theme.  And he loved it!

We went out for dinner, but I made banana bread 10's for desert with the kiddos.  Elise was not happy to be stopping for picture taking purposes.    And Austin is a little slow with the fingers.  ha!

Just a note:  Geo is great in the gift department.  He usually does a mix of romantic and practical.  (ie:  the ice headache mask and the bosch were two of my favorites.  Sometimes he has to print pictures of them off the interent with a note that they are being shipped, but they are great gifts.  :)  This year, the flowers he chose were lovely and he added a beautiful plumeria necklace.  

Traditionally, we watch our wedding video and look at the wedding pictures sometime the week before (usually for Family Home Evening).  And we alternate planning the date.  This year, that task fell to Geo and he planned it in two parts.  On Saturday, we went to the "Made in Hawaii" festival downtown and looked at all sorts of cool crafty stuff.  (wood carvings, jewelry, pottery, photography, art, glass... lots of stuff that I like :).  On the actual day (Wednesday) he planned a picnic lunch at Kaneohe Beach Park.  This was a great plan except that I woke up sick and crabby.  Boo.  I had a good sized headache and a cold and was very dramatic about everything ("why don't mothers get to take a day of 'sick leave' ever ever in their whole lives ever?" etc.  ha, ha!)  Thank goodness I have a very patient husband.  We still went on the picnic lunch but picked up food at Quizno's instead of his planned restaurant so I could have chicken noodle soup.  The ocean air treated me well and I decided to be in a better mood.  How can you not be when the park has a tire swing?

Cute little stow-away

On the beach in San Diego on our honeymoon

Just as romantic ten years later!  Woo-woo!

 It's been a great TEN years!  Of course, there have been bumpy roads and trials, but we've definitely been blessed.  After our picnic date, we watched a little video with pictures reminding us of that fact. I'm so grateful to have Geo to travel the road of life with me.

Here's to the next 10!  

Covering my floor

Lucy's Kindergarten creations

Lucy loved reviewing the stuff she learned throughout the year and explaining her artwork (again).  And George played "I Spy" with her... great fun!  However, its hard to toss stuff (for her and for me plus the stuff we choose to toss is different).  She was especially against tossing her workbooks.  Hmmm... maybe throwing out more stuff throughout the year is a better solution... 

Apparently, this is "running through the fire."  

The games these two come up with are quite funny (and usually big, fat messes :)

Saturday evening bike practice

 
Notice how Elise holds the handlebars backwards.  Ha!  Austin was especially proud of himself for learning how to work the pedals.  He kept repeating:  "I'm doing it!  I'm going!  Look, there's THREE bikes going!"

The simple joys of life... :)

Mooooommmmmm.... I'm stuck!

I hear this several times a day and usually its said in an "I'm-so-proud-of-myself" voice.

Yes, this last one is a little creepy.  He climbed INSIDE the vase on my kitchen table.  Apparently, Elise got in and out just fine.  I didn't witness it, but she and Lucy told me all about it.  I admit, I thought they were both crazy when they bounded up the stairs telling me Austin was in a vase.  I ran to the kitchen and he said, "Mom, I'm stuck" with a big 'ol grin on his face.  After some pulling with no progress, I was worried I'd have to grease his hips to get him out of there.  (Btw, I love Austin's scratchy smoker voice.  It cracks me up!)




P.S.  I tried a yummy pasta salad recipe tonight from A Bountiful Kitchen.  It was a perfect "summer salad" and has moved to my "favorite pasta salads" list -  avocados, mangoes, grapes... how can you go wrong?  And the tarragon lime dressing was to die for. 

Lu's Rapunzel Party

The Tangled Rapunzel Party turned out to be a great success!  Thanks to the internet, I used lots of fun ideas as a springboard for stuff to do at our party.  Fun times!  Alana's mom and sister helped me during the party and I was SO grateful.  I don't know how I would have done it without them.  All the girls from her school class were invited and we ended up having 13 come.  With my 2 toddlers in the mix, it was quite the crowd.

The food table turned out to be a lot of fun.  I used frying pans (man those things are heavy!) and tried to put in some "Tangled" themed snacks.  Of course, the girls didn't care at all.  When I asked them if anyone remembered that Maximus liked to eat apples, they looked at me like I was nuts!  And they loved eating the jello boats (blue jello w/ orange slices and paper sails) but I don't think anyone but the adults thought of the boat ride at the end.  Ha!  Oh well.

The donut tower was a different story however.  The girls thought that was really cool.  And so did I - easiest cake I've ever done.  Oh wait, never mind.  That was definitely the little Debbie snack cake. Anyway, George rigged up the stand thing with a dowel and upside down flower pot.  All I had to do was order donuts and add the frosting on the waffle cone and "hair."

And what did the toddlers do while I was putting this together?

Yep... every bin in the playroom was emptied.   And Austin was dressed as a cowgirl and put into one of them.

We used our Rapunzel hair as a door decoration.

Elise loved sniffing the "magic flower."  :)

So... for the actual party...

First thing we did was make Pascal party blowers.   They also made paper bag "lanterns" to put all their party gear in.

Here I am trying to explain the next game... 

Next we played "Pin the frying pan on Flynn Rider."  I had all the girls write their names on their pans and one girl drew a fried egg too.  Pretty funny.  It was also comical to watch them play.  No one even came close to Flynn's nose, even though they were started in the right direction.  Lucy promptly turned and walked in the opposite direction.  Her's ended up on the opposite wall.  :)  The girls were so funny watching each person walk - squealing with laughter no matter what happened.

Next up, I had the girls watch the "I've got a dream" song in the pub scene in the Tangled movie.  (That's actually my least favorite part.)  Then each girl wrote her dream on a card.  So funny.  We had some doctors, ballerinas, princesses, mommies, and teachers.  Lu's dream was to go to Disneyland and Disneyworld.  My favorite was Alana's: "My dream is to play with legos."  :)  Then we watched the "I See the Light" song (my favorite part of the movie) and watched the lanterns float into the sky.

Afterwards we tied the dream card to a balloon...

... and released them into the sky.

I think this was most of the girls' favorite part of the party.  They were jumping up and down and screaming and watched the balloons go until they all disappeared.  It cracked me up.  I wish I had a video of the chaos. Side note:  For the rest of the night, Austin kept asking if he could go outside and see balloons float into the sky.  Ha!

Light the candles

Eat some treats

Pull goofy faces for present opening time.

These were the party favors - paints (with instructions NOT to paint the walls :) and a Rapunzel hair clip.  (Instructions to make Cinderella are here - I just modified it to be Rapunzel)

As I mentioned previously, I spent way too much time on the internet looking for stuff.  People have some great ideas though!  Here are the sites I used: Paging Supermom, Dreaming of Stitches, Family fun, and this Kids Parties page.  The party was lots of fun to plan and do.  I really love doing stuff like this... but it also took a lot of time.  Because of my current stage of life, I could only do a little bit each day so it felt like I was working on this party FOR-EV-ER (imagine the kid from Sandlot saying this). I was happy with how it turned out though and so was my little Rapunzel.

Lucy is 6!

Thinking hard about what to wish for...

Ready... blow!  (It took three blows to get the candles out! :)

I am so happy to have Lucy in our family!  She is generally a happy child and curious about the world.  I love it when she tells me what she is thinking about.  Her questions crack me up (and sometimes they stump me :).  She's a good snuggler, has a tender heart, and is growing up too fast.  

But what a wonderful six years it has been!  

This morning, she wanted to open presents right away, which wouldn't take long.  Before we left UT, I gave her $20 to spend at a cheap jewelry/trinkets type store.  They have a very large "Everything $1.50 wall."  She was in heaven and bought nothing I would have picked.  Ha!  I kind of figured it was like throwing money down the toilet, but it was interesting to see what she chose... slap bracelet, two small stuffed animals, fake makeup, a big sucker (and an extra to share with her sibs), a hand-held water game... you get the idea.  And I admit, it was a good little subtraction lesson too.  At the end, I said "Now lets go through our baskets (because I had one for myself too.  Nail polish was a steal!) and make sure we want everything that is in there.  Just in case we want to switch things out or something."  Lucy looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Why would we want to do that?!?"  Anyway, she picked up some real treasures.  Ha!  Both grandparents gave their gifts early too (thank you!), so I was wondering what she'd think when she saw just a couple gifts on the table.  But she was thrilled.  She got a bell for her bike, "connect 4" game, some paper dolls and this Tangled lantern thing that plays the romantic lantern song while "lantern lights" move all round the room.  Lucy thought it was the "coolest thing ever."  (Again, when I bought it, I thought it was a waste of $.  But I only had 20 minutes to birthday shop and it was on clearance, so I threw it in.)  

Lucy picked the meals for today, so we had cereal for breakfast, PB/ honey sandwiches for lunch and spaghetti after church.  She made it real easy on me!  And for a cake, she wanted those Oatmeal Cream cookies from Little Debbie.  So we unwrapped six of them, stacked them in a tower and stuck the candles in.  Ha!  Easiest cake ever!  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LU!

(Side note:  I made an experimental guava cheesecake this weekend and thought it would be good to have on the birthday.  The top looked brown and cracked and ugly, but I made some guava glaze that covered it up.  YUMMY!  Plus its pink! ... But she picked the store-bought cookies.  I should have titled this post, "Note to self:  Let your child pick the birthday stuff because you don't have a clue what they like")

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Since her birthday was on a Sunday, we brought in treats to the class on Friday.  They sang "Happy Birthday" in English and Hawaiian, "God's blessings" song, and "How old are you now?"  Here she is answering back:

She wanted to give out the same treats as last year - white chocolate popcorn balls w/ pencils tied to the top.

 Elise and Austin love to be a part of the fun!

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This year, we decided to have a "friend birthday party".  This is Lucy's first "friend only" party.  So far, we've done parties w/ family or a few friends w/ their families included.  The party is coming up on Wednesday and the planning/shopping has been a lot of work.  This is by choice, I realize.  But I love this kind of thing, so I spend way too much time on the internet looking for ideas and I'm not good at narrowing down.  I think we'll stick with the plan of only having friend birthday parties on "even" birthdays.

Cute invitation idea from Martha Stewart website

 The great thing about this little project is that Elise now sort-of knows how to "baid" hair.  So in addition to several elastics in my hair, I now have braids too.

The next idea was inspired by the children, actually.  Right after we got back from vacation, Lucy unraveled an orange plastic lei, tied it to her wrist or ankle and threw it over the balcony as "hair."  Austin yelled "Rapunzel, let down your hair" for three days straight.  It was wonderful.  But when the orange plastic kept breaking and had several knots in it, I thought we should come up with something a little longer lasting.  I saw this rapunzel yarn braid thing on etsy.  But it was only 3 1/2 ft long and I wanted one that went down to the floor from our balcony.  So we made our own...

 This is how it looks all "bustled" up and braided.  That way she could actually walk around the house.

All the kids love the yarn wig and Lucy thinks we should make a wig for each princess.  Ha!  Not going to happen.  We made this one for a Friday night family activity.  I stood in one corner of the living room, George stood in the other corner and Lucy ran back and forth 30 times with the yarn ball for each section of hair.  The toddlers kept using the big long strands as a limbo pole.  George didn't find much humor in that because it started to get all tangled (ha ha!). 

Once they went to bed, we started the braiding.  I thought to grab my camera as we were about a third of the way into it.  I stood at the top of the balcony and braided and Lucy and George followed braiding at the bottom.  If you didn't do it like that, all the pieces would get tangled.  (This joke is going to get old. :)  Lucy thought it was SO much fun.  And George actually had fun too...

 ...especially as we were getting toward the end.

That is one long braid!

Lucy loves the thing and wears it all over - singing away and believing it really has magical powers.  :)