Frozen Party

As always, pinterest is just overflowing with ideas for themed birthday parties. After seeing the movie Frozen this past winter I was sure that was the theme we would be doing for my daughters birthday party. Last year we did a combined Mickey and Minnie birthday party for my son and daughter. My hubby convinced me to do a combined one again this year. I didn't think Frozen would fly with my son who was turning 7 so I resigned myself to just going a simple pool party. sure I would probably cutesy it up some but I was going to go simple. Then one day while taking my son to school he asked me if he and little girl were having a birthday party together this year. I told him yeah that they were. he asked me what kind of birthday party? I told him a pool party. he said no mommy what kind? I said, like a theme? he said yeah. I asked him what would he like. he said, Frozen.  and so here is my attempt at a frozen birthday party.

The entrance to the party.

I saw this idea here.



 

Sven's Antlers (and snowballs)

found this idea here

and if you open up the link you will also see Kristoff's Ice. I had the blue jello all ready to go and left it at home.

 

Snowman noses were found here and we have cucumbers in our garden so I added those to the table as disc sleds  

 

 

we always have a form of lemonade at the kids birthday party (pink or yellow) I decided to sitck with the yellow and call it melted yellow snow to have a little bit of that boyish humor into the princessey party. 

 

 

these two cousins. glad they have so much fun toghether

 

is he not the cutest little guy every. he plays shy with me......a lot. but I think that he really likes me.

my awesome mom took come cute pictures of the cakes. really she took pretty much all of the pictures. my mother in law brought the kids their gifts in these reuseable bags(which are awesome) and mom set them behind the cakes as photo backgrounds. i love it.

I wish I had taken pictures of the insides of the cakes. this one is little girls and it looked like this on the inside.  i was trying to go somewhat with this look for the top. i am happy with the way it turned out.

 

for Golden boys cake I came across this pin and thought it was so cute. I got the figurine set on ebay. Kristoff's Ice was going to go in a bowl right next to him. (can you tell I am still a little sad that I forgot it?)

 

my sweet niece

 me and my girl

 

the party invites I found here and loved the way that they turned out.

and while we didn't do favors this year I saw this and thought that I would write it on the driveway as people were leaving. I am a terrible speller and my 2nd grade, super smart niece helped me when it came to spelling coming. (I had to m's in there, ugh)



I thought about making these magic wands

snowballs (white powdered donuts)

marshmellows

and  a back drop similar to this  or this

but in the end I kept telling my self simple and easy and that is they way it ended up. we had a great time and so did the kids.

 

 



Map it Out

 my husband loves maps. we don't have a gps for the cars.......sure our phones have them but we rarely use it. he loves to sit down and map out how to get places. when we moved across the country years ago we had AAA books and lots of maps to get us where we needed to go. same way when we came home three and a half years later.  when we had Golden boy we did his room in a safari theme. my sister came and helped me paint this monkey on the wall, as well as a gator and a giraffe. now that he is 7 (YES 7, I can't believe that is even possible) we were wanting to update his room and make it more of a big boy room. that process has been going on for a little over a year now. we didn't want to paint over the animals we just wanted to incorporate them into the theme. I guess the theme is ADVENTURE.  I found the quilt at target on line. it came with the two pillow shams.

 so my husband found this great US map at a yard sale for like $2 and we hung it up in Golden boys room. only problem is that we couldn't get it to stay up and it was way to big to have frames. so guess where I went to look for an idea on how to hang it? Pinterest. You got it. I came across this, this, and this pin. I ended up going with the last tutorial to hand the poster. Golden boy and I stopped at home depot one afternoon, picked up two dowel rods and brought them home to hang the map. I had to use some push pins on the back side and gravity was working against me on the bottom so I had to take it down and use some hot glue to get the dowel rod to hold on but all in all I think it came out great and we really like the out come.

 

thanks for the great tutorial Crystelle Boutique

The Library

I never claimed to be much of a writer. so that fact that I have a blog......I am not quite sure how that happened. but it did. a long time ago. before I had the two little people that reside in my home and in my heart. it was just me and my hubby and we were taking on the world (or so we though)
I am not eloquent in what I have to say, I don't always capitalize where I am suppose to or use punctuation where I should, I know that I spell works wrong all the time.......even though there is spell check.  all that being said I lay in bed last night thinking about this post this morning. a simple post about the library. my brain went through the whole process and the whole post on what I was going to say and last night as was constructing it, in my head, it sounded great. now here I am this morning and I have not clue what exactly my head was thinking last night. here goes though. at least an attempt on what I think I was going to say.

the library. I could walk the aisles of the library. browsing books. checking them out. oh how I love the library. Be still my heart. I mean really the next best thing to it is a book store. no particular book store either. really just anyone. so now I have these two little ones and I love reading and I hope to pass my love of reading to these two little people who live in my house and my heart. these two though........they are not me.......they are rarely like me.......I love that about them but it makes it hard on a trip to the library. a place of quiet and calm. those two words rarely go with my two. that's ok with me, usually.

I braved the library with them to hopefully get them some books that they like and that I could read to them. Golden boy started looking through the books right away and found a stack of them that he was interested in. it seemed like over half of them were about Christmas time, which I thought was funny. I went through them and added some readers to the sack too.

 little girl came with her stack. much smaller than his but it was all fine. in fact I think the only one she picked out was the Romeo and Juliet one. (we have the Pride & Prejudice one and she loves it. when I saw the Romeo and Juliet one I thought she may get it. there was also a Wuthering Heights one and many more) Golden boy handed her the Alice in Wonderland one and the Dr Seuss one and I got the Do you know which ones will grow one. she prefers roam. I try to make sure her roaming it close by and where I can see her. but she is constantly on the move and is back and fourth between the computes, book and puzzles. on top of getting all of these books for the kids I had two on hold for me and as we made our way into the kid section there was a book sitting on the end cap of an aisle and it looked familiar, like one that I had came across on pinterest as one that I wanted to read and pinned to my books worth reading board. 

 when we had picked out all the books that we were going to check out I handed each of them their stack and we headed to check them out. it was hard enough to get them to the check out station with the books and they didn't want to have to carry them anymore. so after checking them out I piled them all into my arms and we headed out the door. it was then that we ran into some of our friends headed into the library.  I probably looked like a crazy person ushering the kids out the door carrying all the books. I hope I just looked like a person that look like she loves books. As they were walking in she showed me a cute bag, that she bought on Etsy, for her oldest, that had a plastic badge holder on it to keep his library card. brilliant, genius. the next time I was I walmart I located the area that had the badge holders. they come in a pack of......well I don't really remember but way more than I needed. really I only needed two but a $1.88 for way more than I needed.......SOLD! (that being said local friends.....if you need a badge holder for your child's library card give me a shout out I have one for you.)  I knew that bag I would probably use for Golden boy but wasn't sure about Little girl until I got home and remembered this beauty. it was mine when I was a kid. my nanny painted it for me, my sister has a blue one that I think has balloons on it. I knew it would be perfect for Little girls library bag.

 I located the zip ties that I had left over from our Disney World trip and attached the library card to the bag. Yeah for library bags! Yeah for card holders! Yeah for friends with great ideas!

 Here is Golden boy's bag.  it is just a reusable grocery bag that he got from my mom......I mean Tinderbell. His Tinker-gifts in Disney showed up in this bag every morning.

Go to Library

Our Fourth of July Celebration

it is pretty nice when the fireworks that are shot off in the city is happing right across the street from the neighborhood that you live in. for the post three or four years we have walked up to the front of the neighborhood and sat in a parking lot there to watch the firework show.

 the darker it got the glow sticks came out. always a fun thing to have when it gets dark outside.

 then the magic happens

mesmerizing and spectacular

fireworks, one of my favorite things

 and of course another item that was on our 2014 summer list to check off

Fireworks

The List Keeps Dwindeling

we have been making our way through our 2014 summer list and it has been lots of fun. with only like three or four weeks left of summer it seems like there is no way that we will every make it through it all. in fact I am pretty sure that we won't get to everything before school starts but school starts early this year so some of our summer activities take place once school has stated. I am ok with that.

last week was VBS

do you see it VBS.

anyway, I got these pictures of the kids at home before VBS one morning. I didn't take my camera with me to VBS. it was just too busy but lots of fun. Workshop of wonders was such a fun theme and we had a great time transforming the church into a workshop for painters, carpenters/builders, and scientist.

 

nothing says cute like a couple of goofy faced kids. it was my way to get them to post and do what I wanted them to do for the pictures above. you do what you can to get results, right?

here is another one of the things on the list that we did.
Watercolor
I found two picture that I thought the kids would like and printed them and used our water color paints. Golden boy wasn't all that crazy about painting and ended up coloring. he wants things to be in the lines and the exact color they are suppose to be. note to self: next time give him something more abstract that he can color whatever. not peter pan where he wants him to look a certain way and can't get it that way......or a minion.  it just wasn't working for him. little girl on the other hand loved it. the flower that she is painting is actually the second picture that she painted. the first was a castle.

 

 our sweet neighbor saw the kids playing outside with the hose and came over with an extra sprinkler that she had for us to use. they kids had a great time running through it.

 

last was a fourth of July craft. this wasn't on our summer list but something that I pinned and thought would be fun. the only thing that I needed to purchase for this craft was the blue beads. I hadn't the bakers twine (but really you could use yard or ribbon) and I had the red striped paper straws as well. I think I cut two of them. this was the pin that I found and it links to this site that gives you the tutorial on doing it. great idea and lots of fun.

 I didn't think that my almost seven year old would want to make a necklace. when we were in home depot the day before he saw an American flag that he wanted. I told him that we could go home and make one. when he saw my version of making one he wasn't thrilled with it but he was a trooper and finished it and later on he got a real one.

 

and finally nothing says summer like a little ice cream treat at the new old mc donalds (that would just be Mc Donalds to everyone else but Golden boy has always called it old mc donalds) that the kids have been watching being built. who knew they would be so tired though. this is how I found them when I went to sit down. they did hope up to gobble up their ice cream.

Lowe Mill Saturday

 on Saturday we went to Lowe Mill our artist corner of the city. we weren't sure what to expect except that we knew that there was going to be a trunk sale (people selling their stuff out of the back of their cars) we browsed around there. it wasn't long before a dark cloud appeared and we felt a rain drop of so. it wasn't even longer after that before it came down. there was seriously no where to go but some people who were selling some neat vintage stuff and awesome tie-dye shirts let us hole up under their umbrella. it was maybe five minutes of rain but it was drenching rain. me and little girl were pretty soaked. it soon cleared and blue skies came out and warm sun to dry us off. we headed to the first floor of the artist area. then the hubby got two taco's from the food truck and I got the kids snowballs from a new Orleans snowball truck. they were yummy and the closest thing to NOLA snowballs as you can get here.

 bubble gum and strawberry snowballs

they shared some too

 we took the elevator (an awesome old time one) up to the second and then third floor before stopping in to get some yummy juice in this awesome mason jar.

 blue skies over lowe mill

 the food truck that we got taco's from and before we left we got some hand cut French fries that were covered in garlic salt.

 I think the kids had a really great time. care free and happy kids.

So.....

.....I have this pretty amazing kid.
on the blog I call him golden boy and that he is.
he is my oldest.
a boy.
did I mention he is pretty amazing.

our small group went through the study The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. it goes through the five ways people give and receive love. after figuring out mine (which I am not sure changed much in the 12 years we have been married) I was eager to figure out what my kids were.

the love languages are: quality time, acts of service, gift giving, physical touch and words of encouragement. thinking through them and observing my son I leaned over to my hubby one day and said, "I think his number one love language is physical touch." he agreed. the kids loves hugs. sometimes a hug is all he needs to get him over a rough spell. in fact one day during the school year I was sitting down doing homework with him and he was having a melt down about something that had to do with the school work and my daughter happened to walk into the room and simply said, "mommy, just hug him." I scooped him up and wrapped my arms around him and hugged him and things got a bit better. the kid will be in the back of the van and say "mommy will you hold my hand" or sometimes he just says "I want some loving hugs."

Physical touch.....for sure number one for my golden boy. figuring out what is the next one can be more difficult. the kid is a culmination of all of the them it seems. he loves getting gifts as well as giving them, he thrives on words of encouragement, sitting down and reading to him, playing legos, putting together puzzles(all good things to him, quality time). so I my head I thought "well, at least I know what is the last thing on his list of love languages. Acts of service."

just yesterday he proved that theory wrong. I was out in the kitchen doing something and here he comes into the kitchen carrying the laundry basket from our room. I asked him what he was doing with it and he said that he was bringing it to the laundry room to help out because he saw that I was doing some laundry. I gave him a big hug and told him how much I appreciated it but that I was not planning on doing our laundry any time soon. he brought it back to our room but let me know that he picked up the pile of laundry that was in the hallway bathroom and put it in the laundry room for me. (this was much appreciated because it was beginning to pile up and I was needing to get to the laundry room) big hugs again and praise for how thoughtful he was to think of that. by this time I am getting my daughter out of her room from her failed attempt at a nap and make my way into the hallway and by our bedroom when I notice golden boy on our bed and he is making it (no I do not make my bed every morning.....deep down I wish that I did but I just don't)  I couldn't help myself. I walked into the room with great big smile on my face and gave him the biggest hug and the told him how much I love him and how wonderful of a boy he was. he just wanted to do something nice for us and bless us and just be loving.

how in the world do I even rank these love languages with this kid. he is all encompassing when it comes to them. I am just awed and overwhelmed and blessed at the kid God has blessed me with in this little boy. my prayer is that I can daily see the good in this amazing boy that God has given me and how wonderfully I am blessed to have him in my life.

Making our way.....

......through this summers bucket list.

just this weekend we did quite a few things.

we swam in our fifth pool of the summer
Swim in five different pools

Pick blueberries
(this will probably happen a couple more times, benefit, they are in our front yard)

 splash pad

 they did have some fun but they did a lot of sitting here (because they were cold) and asking for snacks. then I let them play on the play ground for about 15min before we left. when it was time to leave they both went on and on about how hot they were. (oh, sometimes you just can't please them)

 Blowing bubbles

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