(Still) Birthday!

Last week was busy with Birthday Part II, III, and IV and that whole holiday thing on Thursday. Thankfully, the weekend was pretty relaxing. Not quite as relaxing as we planned since the refrigerator stopped working on Friday morning. (Thankfully, after a little over three hours of tinkering, we had that bad boy functioning again except for the ice maker which went from hyperactive to comatose. But, hey, ice cube trays bring retro fun into the kitchen!) Also, we Tetris'ed up the house again to get the boys' beds out of the sunroom for the winter. Lots of random stories to share, but for tonight, here are some pics of all the birthday madness.

Birthday Madness Part II involved Leon and Michael's birthday celebration at school. They light a candle to represent the sun, and they hold a globe to represent the earth. Then the "earth" travels around the "sun" once for each year of their life. While they are walking, the teacher reads stories about what happened to them in that year.

They actually had a pretty nifty candle holder. The kids put on four pieces representing the seasons to encircle the candle, and then put on "rays" labeled with the months of the year.

We always take the kids out to eat for their birthdays and, of course, we go to a restaurant of their choice. For birthday celebration number 3 (!), the boys wanted to have dinner at Chuck E. Cheese. We went on Wednesday night, and there were mercifully only three or four other families there.

For anyone who is curious, they haven't updated it much since we were kids. The band is the same and it still plays 80s music. Apparently, those guys are difficult to reprogram! There is a TV next to the stage with a "hipster" guy who talks about 80s music and explains what records are so the kids can get the references of the chef with the bad Italian accent. So wrong.

While we were there, Leon went nuts, running from game to game, spending his tokens as fast as he could.

The girls road on a simulation roller coaster.

The images were actually pretty fun to watch.

Leon and Michael's actual birthday was on Thanksgiving. Although we typically celebrate family birthdays after dinner, the boys were so excited that for birthday celebration four, we let them open presents in the morning before everyone got dressed. It was like a little Christmas morning preview.

Birthday Madness, Part I

Last Thanksgiving brought forth a week of madness as we headed to Orlando to celebrate Leon and Michael's birthday, to attend my cousin's wedding, to visit Disney World and, um, oh, to eat some turkey. It's amazing how sometimes the stars align, and it was a very enjoyable, crazy time. Actually, the only things that didn't go amazingly smoothly while we were gone were the drive home on I-95 the Sunday after Thanksgiving (I will never reclaim those 14 hours, but the kids did surprisingly well), the fact that I forgot to plan for the kids' wedding clothes so Ree ended up wearing Natalia's socks along with her otherwise gorgeous flower girl ensemble (she didn't complain, though) and Leon's pants fell all the way while solemnly being escorted down the aisle by the usher (to his credit, the little dude kept on truckin'), and the stress of the week caused Michael to break out in head-to-toe hives which miraculously went away the morning after the wedding.

We can't always count on things working out quite that well (summer vacation of doom, I am thinking of you! again and again and again), and so we are having a much quieter Thanksgiving week this year. It is just our little family at home, and we are looking forward to a day in which we can give thanks in our pajamas while eating way too much and watching hours and hours of TV. However, despite the relative quiet, we are getting in a week of birthday celebrations, since these little guys turn 4 tomorrow. 

The birthday madness started with a party last Saturday. Despite having a larger guest list, only two families were able to attend. However, given the size of our tribe and the fact that one of the family's in attendance has three children, we still had eight kids running through our house. It was actually a good sized party, and at the boys' request, we had Angry Birds EVERYTHING. 

There were Angry Birds cupcakes, which looked surprisingly less gray and scary when frosted.

I hadn't planned on party favors, but Ree insisted, and so we had Angry Birds graham crackers in Angry Birds bags.

For entertainment, we placed the train table in the living room and set up two Angry Birds board games and a ton of blocks on the table and the kids played with those for nearly two hours.

I am lacking pictures, but we also had Angry Birds banners all over the house. We were very festive.

The Curse of the Youngest

A friend recently blogged that her husband is stuck with the "curse of marrying the youngest" child in a family - what the youngest wants, the youngest gets. Natalia seems to have caught on to this early.

Recently, we've caught Natalia playing on our new computer while we are busy getting the big kids ready for bed. (The youngest somehow goes to bed last.) We are slow learners, and it took her several days to teach us that we have to actually shut down the computer before bedtime, because she knows how to activate it from sleep mode. We thought the love for the computer desk would end once we cut off her private computer time, but Natalia merely viewed it as an opportunity to explore further. That's when we found her sitting at the computer desk, playing with pens. She wrote all over our check register. She found a sheet of postage stamps, and marked all over it. She was very thorough and made sure not to miss any stamps.

We have also found Natalia in the middle of the kitchen table recently. Not leaning over, but actually on the table, and sometimes standing. Apparently the Thanksgiving decorations in the middle of the table are just to much fun to resist. However, we have to be careful in yelling at her, because when she is up there, she always jumps when we call her name. (We also used to have the same problem with Leon when he was about this age. He would stand on his tiptoes on the arm of the futon in the play room in order to reach the top of the play kitchen. We learned to always let him finish, and THEN yell at him for being dangerous. Funny how that never seemed to prevent him from doing it.)

Recently Natalia also snuck out to a garage, a place she is not currently allowed to visit since it is the storage room of doom. She finally came stumbling back into the house, hugging the kids' little potty. She sat it in middle of kitchen, pointed at it, and said, "Pee!" Despite her choice of locations for the potty, we actually moved it to the bathroom. Since it's been there, she has sat on the potty several times and peed in her diaper. She has also made us late to places on multiple occasions. Each time while I was busy buckling the big kids into the car, she stayed behind in the house. When I come back in the house to get her, I've found her in the bathroom with her shoes off and her pants down while she frantically tugged on her diaper. There was no leaving until she actually tried to go to the bathroom. She did actually go in the potty one time. She was not impressed. But on another day, she came shuffling through the house with Leon and Michael's Angry Birds underwear around her knees. To explain herself, she proudly told me, "Panties!"

Cupcakes

Over the past week and a half, I have started writing a lot of times, but I have never finished anything. Life has just been too crazy. Each time I sat down either someone needed something or I quickly realized my thoughts were incoherent. Among other things, we had visitors for a week, three out of four kids have been sick with really bad colds/bronchitis, we unexpectedly changed where Ree takes dance, and I've had to plan Leon and Michael's first ever "kid" birthday party.

Birthday party planning is always a bit of a struggle for me. For one thing, I am completely socially awkward, and I never know who to invite. In this case, the boys knew exactly who they wanted to invite from preschool, but I didn't know the parents. Long story short, I survived, and there are even children coming to the party.

The other party planning challenge is the overachiever perfectionist in me, wants to throw a "perfect" party like the ones all proudly displayed on Pinterest. Unfortunately, we don't have the money to buy all the necessary crap to make everything perfectly themed, and I am lacking the time to make it myself. (And in some instances, I just can't justify the waste of so much of the stuff.) I also want the kids to be involved. Thankfully, I know it really comes down to the birthday children having fun, and I am usually able to let go. Or I just throw myself in head first before I have time to think about it.

The birthday party is this Saturday, and earlier this week Leon and Michael helped me bake cupcakes. This wasn't really a planned endeavor, so I began by giving them a choice of either having yellow cupcakes or a chocolate cupcakes, using the two cake mixes I had on hand. They settled on half "vanilla" cupcakes and half chocolate. So we mixed up the yellow cake mix, I divided the batter, and I added cocoa to half. (We actually sifted it in, and Leon loved that part.) After the batter was divided and flavored, they informed me they wanted "swirled" cupcakes. With the batter swirled in the mixing bowl. So swirl we did. And they proudly made gray cupcakes. Really weird, elephant colored cupcakes.

All the food bloggers out there would cringe. But when I tucked them in to bed that night and asked their favorite part of the day, both Leon and Michael said, "Making cupcakes!" I may cringe a little too at the sight of the cupcakes, but it's hard to argue with their enthusiasm. Not to mention, it's nothing a little icing can't hide. I can't wait to see how they decorate them.

Not Quite 100 Days of Real Food

The holidays are already upon us. Holy cow. If I couldn't tell by the calendar, I can definitely tell by the kids. They are already completely out of control a wee bit excited. Yesterday's primary entertainment seemed to be running on the couch and jumping on our bed.

And the holiday fun in our house keeps going and going and going. Between now and Valentine's Day we will celebrate all the major holidays plus five birthdays. We'll also throw in a Super Bowl party, and I'm sure some other events will pop up. Based on last year, this translates into a lot of bad eating.

There was a part of me, the insane, anal retentive overachiever, who thought, "This is the year we will eat healthy! We will substitute whole grains and fruit for all the junk! We will limit baking! Sugar products will be made with coconut sugar and other natural sweeteners! Gone will be the white flour and white sugar!" And then I burst out laughing, because even I am not ready to consider giving up some of that yumminess at the holidays.

So instead of being "perfect" or extremist, we're going to try to get through the holidays with moderation. (I know. How shockingly un-American.) To help us, we are going to be following the 100 Days of Mini-Pledges at 100 Days of Real Food.

To be perfectly honest, last week was actually our first week. We were supposed to eat two fruits and vegetables with every meal. Even with me allowing snacks to count so we didn't always have to get those servings in with each meal, it was a failure. There wasn't a single day we actually managed to get two servings of fruit and vegetables with every meal, BUT we came close. We even managed to have two servings of vegetables and dinner on Halloween! And I learned a lot. So I will be consulting with my nutrition gurus at breakfast (that would be the children). And I think we are going for a do-ever. Stay tuned...