Happy Birthday Matthew!!

 Matthew turned 5 years old on Tuesday and had a fun birthday.  Last week he had a friend party at Chuck E. Cheese which was a lot of fun.  Today at school he got to bring a birthday snack and the kids sang "Happy Birthday" to him.  He was excited 'cause he got to wear a crown at school.  Here's our big birthday boy!

He got to pick our dinner and he choose hot dogs, or "yumblats" as we sometimes call them.  That's what Martian Mickey calls hot dogs on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse tv show that Matthew likes.  Here we are eating our yumblats.  Scott and I had chili dogs.  Matthew ate his plain and Anna just stared at hers and ate potato chips.

 She did add cheese to hers though.

 Matthew told me he would eat three and nearly made it.  I think the crown helped.

 Grant eating some Corn Chex, one of his current favorite things.

 Here is Matthew's Mickey Mouse cake that I made.  :) 
This is about as fancy as I get in the cake department.  :)

 Singing Happy Birthday...

 ...and blowing out the candles.

And here's Matthew going on his treasure hunt for presents.  I've done this for him several years and now he expects it.  I was thinking of doing something else this year, but all day he's been saying he can't wait to go on a treasure hunt for his presents, so I couldn't disappoint him.

 Anna is his treasure hunt helper of course.

 More presents.

Grant waited patiently for the treasure hunters to return.  He found a balloon that was floating by, which was exciting for him.

And here's Matthew opening some presents.  Dinosaur Legos.

Star Wars Legos.  We've already built this one by the way.  

He liked building it and said, "Legos are so fun!"

And the piece de resistance, the Finn McMissile (from Cars 2) that talks and shoots missiles.  Matthew was very excited about this one and took it up to bed with him...after shooting a few missiles at things.

He also got some little Star Wars figurines, but Anna was much more interested in them than Matthew was.  She took Jar Jar Binks and Anakin with her to bed and has been playing with them (and some of the other ones we got Matthew) ever since.

Here she is playing with them.  :)  It was a busy and exciting birthday.  I'm glad I was able to get everything ready in time.  Happy Birthday Matthew! 

Chuck E. Cheese

We had a birthday party for Matthew this week at Chuck E. Cheese.  Matthew was so excited for the party!  Here he is just before the party started.  Grant was afraid when he saw the big animatronic Chuck E. Cheese come out.  Poor Grant!

We invited some school friends, some church friends and some friend friends - 12 kids total.  We ate pizza, played lots of games, had cake, got to meet Chuck E. and then played some more games.  Here are the kids dancing to some of the Chuck E. Cheese songs. 

We got Matthew a cake from Sams Club - Mickey Mouse themed.  Matthew helped pick it out.

 Chuck E. Cheese came out to help us sing "Happy Birthday" to Matthew.

 Then they followed him around on a little parade and got some free tickets!  It was very exciting!  I think the kids had a good time and Matthew had fun too.   Matthew said his favorite game was riding the big truck.

Anna got a lot of tickets but she didn't want to surrender them all.  Here she is, with a little bit of frosting on her face still, turning in some of her tickets.  Anna took lots of sketch pictures of herself and rode the little roller coaster ride a lot.  I think she had fun too.

If you build it...

...he will come.

Scott showed me a neat trick with Grant.  We have trouble keeping Grant contained and Scott discovered that if he builds a tower, Grant will have to come and knock it down.  He just can't help himself.

 Destroy!

So, if Grant is starting to escape and head up the stairway (his new favorite thing to do) the siren song of a newly built tower will be too much for him to resist.

 He will have to come back...

 ...to knock it over.

 Grant subscribes to the "no stone left unturned" philosophy of tower destruction.

So I was glad to discover a new Grant containment strategy.  Thanks Scott.  You better watch out though.  Another thing Grant loves to get his hands on is the camera!

Uh oh!  He's spotted me!  Here he comes!

 Grant, you are so cute.  Now please stop climbing those stairs!!

Valen-Tired

We had a busy Valentine's Day this year.  The day before we had a fun playgroup party and the kids exchanged Valentines.  On real Valentine's Day we made sugar cookies.  The kids liked spreading the flour around.

 And we had to decorate the cookies.

The kids heavily favored the conversation hearts (Matthew calls them "fortune hearts") in their decorating.

We had to run a bunch of errands, including a last minute visit to the scout shop and when we got home we had some time to decorate with a few balloons.  We put some candies inside each one and blew them up.  Then the kids had fun playing with them.  Yes, it looks like Anna is about to attack Grant, but they were really just playing with the balloons.

 We also went to Matthew's preschool Valentine party.  Here are the kids playing musical chairs.

And our evening culminated with a romantic dinner...the Blue and Gold cub scout dinner.  Why did we have the Blue and Gold dinner on Valentine's Day?  Because that was our scheduled day (second Tuesday of the month) to have the room at the church.  I tried to get the date changed months ago (I am one of the cub scout leaders, which is why we went) but I was out voted.  If I'm in that situation again, I'm going to fight harder to change the date, 'cause I would have much rather been having dinner at home with the family or a nice dinner out with Scott than running a cub scout dinner on Valentine's Day.  In any case, it's over now and I think Scott and I will be going out to dinner some other night this week.  :)  Happy Valentine's Day everyone!!

Delegating

As my kids get bigger they are able to do more and more jobs around the house.  A lot of times they just don't want to help and sometimes I resort to bribery, but then there are those glorious times when they are eager to help.  Today the kids both vacuumed different parts of the house for me.  They had to fight about it first, but still.  They also both love emptying the dishwasher.  They can't reach all the cupboards and sometimes I'm left wondering what happened to all the spoons, but its still very nice.  And yesterday Anna wanted to feed Grant.  It's not my favorite job since he is resistant to eating and it takes a lot of time, so when Anna kept asking me if she could feed him I thought, "why am I fighting this?"  She sat by him and patiently fed him his baby food for at least half an hour.  She was very conscientious about her duties.  She even got him to open up for the food a lot.

She even chopped up some grape pieces for him with her cutting board and safety knife.  Lately whenever I have to chop anything for meals, she wants to help me with her own stuff.  And she does a pretty good job too.  She might have taken her feeding responsibilities too far 'cause the next day she kept trying to force feed me half eaten fruit snacks.  :)  It made me feel sorry for Grant a little bit.

Matthew is also a big helper.  After filling out all the invitations to his birthday party Matthew wanted to stuff and seal the envelopes.  I was going to say no at first but then I thought better of it and let him.  He said he liked doing all of it except the licking.  I told him he didn't have to seal them, but he said he wanted to anyway.

He made sure they were all sealed by karate chopping and punching them.  Done and done!  Thanks little helpers for making my life just a little bit simpler.

The Big Snow

We got a little bit of a snow storm on Friday and ended up with about 8 inches of new snow.  Scott got to stay home from work because of the snow.  Unfortunately he still had to take a co-worker to an early doctor appointment and had to go out in the bad weather.  He slid around a little bit, but luckily  he was ok.  Matthew was excited to have a snow day.  Here he is all dressed up to go out in the snow.

 A first tentative step out into the snow.

Matthew wanted to make snowballs and a snowman, but the snow was so dry that it wasn't holding together very well.  That's our Colorado snow.  Very dry and powdery.

Matthew made it look so fun that Anna wanted to join him.  She went out and fell in a drift and got stuck.  Luckily Matthew helped her out, so I didn't have to go out there. :)

They had lots of fun in the snow.