Party x 2

I've been asking Gracie for a while now if she would mind if she and Sammie shared a birthday party this year. At first she was against it, but after I explained that she'd still get her own cake and her own presents, I don't think she could figure out a reason not to. She picked the theme again - flowers. I think I took probably 100 pictures of the two of them for the invitation until I finally got a good one, I just could not get both of them to smile for the life of me, and I got tired of trying so I just picked the best of the choices I had. I think they had fun. I got little flower pots and had them decorate them with markers and stickers and then they could all pick out some fake flowers to put in there. They looked really cute. I'm pretty sure all the girls did one, of even two, for some reason the boys weren't very into it :) I had to grab Bradley from running around for 2 minutes to do one. Of course AFTER the party (when all his friends were gone) he probably spent a good half hour making a beautiful pot, he definitely takes pride in his work and takes his time. Of course a lot of the kids just wanted to squish the foam that was in the pot - that was more exciting :)

 

 

Christmas

I sure love Christmas :) This year we did get 2 trees. Kevin got his fake, tall, skinny one for the front room, and I got my real one for the lower room - and I loved both of them! I just love watching the kids and how excited they get. Oh - and we started Elf of the Shelf this year and the kids LOVED it. His name is Cweedy (?) :) He likes to hang out in high places, which the kids can never reach, which is weird, but totally his choice :) Every morning they would run downstairs to find him and get super excited to show us. In the several months since Christmas I have heard over a dozen times how much Gracie misses Cweedy, it will be super exciting to see him again this year.

 

Bradley's 6th Birthay Party

Bradley has been obsessed with markers lately. He carries them around in his pockets :) And it's not just markers, also pens, pencils, any writing utensil really. We used to have a mug on the microwave with pens and pencils that we could use when we needed it - it is now empty. I also used to have one in my room and it's also empty. He has stolen every single pen, pencil, and marker in this house and added it to his 'collection'. He gets super excited when he finds one and has to try it out. He will come up to me and ask if one is 'permanent, dry erase, or washable' (in the last couple months thanks to his birthday and Christmas his stash has grown substantially. I even got him several large pencil cases to hold all of them and it's still not enough :)) So when I asked him what kind of party he wanted this year he said he wanted a drawing party, which I kind of transformed into a drawing/painting party. Kevin built one big, long easel for everyone to paint on and we did pictionary for anyone who wanted to play. I gave everyone aprons with their names on them, I wish I had a picture of all of them, they looked really cute with them on :) It was a lot of fun! I was too busy trying to make sure the kids were entertained enough, so Kevin took some pictures but we didn't get as many as normal. I think Bradley is getting too big to have his parties at home anymore, which makes me sad :) With the addition of his kindergarten friends this year, we had about 20 kids total, and when it's right in the middle of winter and we can't even go outside, and my house is small - it was super tight! And, it's getting harder and harder to keep all those kids entertained. I'm sure we'll have to rent out a place that does parties next year, we'll see what we come up with :)