Matthew's Magical Birthday

Matthew turned 7 years old on Friday.  He requested a wizard/magic themed party a la Harry Potter.  He's never read or seen anything Harry Potter.  He only knows about it from Scott and I talking about it (Scott and I are both really into Harry Potter) and going to the wizarding world of Harry Potter at Universal a few years back. But he's been really into magic and wizard things lately.  He got a wand for Christmas and loves to play pretend with it or use it for his different magic tricks.  I decided to just do a family party this year since Matthew didn't seem to care that much about having a friend party this year or ask for one.  Our party started right after Matthew got home from school on his birthday!  I decorated while he was at school.  Here he is ready to get this party started!

 We pretended to be students/professors at Hogwarts and had tons of fun with it.

 I decorated a little bit while the kids were at school.

 

We made different places in the house different places from the world of Harry Potter.

 We made tiny cookie witch/wizard hats

 Grant did a lot of candy and cookie eating

 We made big pretzel wands

 We played this cup stacking game

 The kids were amazingly good at it!

 Even Grant was really good at it.  They must get it from Scott!

 Anna did great but kept leaving two cups stacked together on the bottom...like I do  ;)

 Then John came over and wanted to get in on it

 You can imagine what happened next

Destroy!

Maybe John gets that from me

 Then we played the marshmallow game, but with spoons instead of chopsticks.  Anna won with 20 marshmallows in 30 seconds.  Thanks Cody and Alycia for the fun game ideas!! 

We had dinner and magical potion to drink!  Matthew cast spells on the cups that turned the clear soda into colorful potion (thanks to food coloring hidden under the ice).  The kids loved it, and especially loved how each cup of soda turned a different color.  They said we "Mary Poppinsed" the soda.  They kept asking for more magic potion.  It was fun!

 Later we went on a wizard quest (an elaborate treasure hunt).

Along the way we found the golden snitch.

 Gathered some dragon eggs

And learned some magic words.  We also visited the Mirror of Erised, the herbology garden, the potions classroom, the Quidditch Field, Gringott's bank, Ollivander's, the Forbidden Forest and some other Harry Potter places.  And we found cloaks, wands, wizard gold, cauldrons and potion bottles, brooms, dragon eggs, a bunch of magical creatures, the golden snitch...some other things I'm not thinking of now...and we got sorted by the sorting hat (by drawing one of the house names out of a cup while wearing the large sorting hat).  Matthew and Anna got Slytherin!!  And Grant got Ravenclaw.  They have no idea really what those mean, but got to wear a (paper) patch with their house crest on it.  So they were happy.

 In the end Matthew completed the wizard quest and found his presents

If you look close you can see Matthew's Slytherin crest on his shirt.

We had a lot of fun pretending to be wizards for the day.  Matthew said it was a great party.  He loved it.  Anna has already requested that we do the same thing for her birthday in August.  We'll see if she still feels that way in a few more months.

And Matthew is excited to actually read or have Harry Potter read to him this year.  J.K. Rowling recommended age 7 or 8 as a good age to start reading the books to your kids.  Although he's a good reader there are still lots of words beyond his level in Sorcerer's Stone, but if I read it to him it might go better.  I don't know, we'll see.  Happy Birthday Matthew!!

Wedding, Wedding

Our whirlwind trip to Maryland for John's wedding (Scott's brother).

Last weekend we drove from Illinois to Maryland to Scott's brother's wedding.  It was a quick trip. The kids are in school so we wanted to miss as few school days as possible to minimize make up test and work.  They ended up missing one day.  We left Thursday right after school and immediately drove right into a very ferocious thunder storm.  If it had been me driving I would have pulled over and tried to wait it out.  We ran into the storm about 20 minutes after leaving the house.  And the storm was with us most of the way to Ohio, where we stayed for the night.  I generally don't mind a little rain, but this was something else.  Visibility was the major problem.  Also there was heavy rain and strong wind.  Scott drove right through it all, no problem.  Although it was not a relaxing drive - very tense.

Here you can see the edge of the storm.  We eventually drove out of it near Terre Haute, Indiana.  We thought the storm was going north and we were heading east.  Unfortunately the storm was apparently going northeast and caught up to us in Terre Haute, where we had stopped for dinner.  So more bad weather driving...this time in the dark.  Boo.  Luckily we made it to Fairborn, Ohio (near Dayton) where we stopped for the night with no accidents.

And the next day we drove from Ohio to Columbia, Maryland where we stayed at John's house, along with the rest of the Guptill clan.  My parents also drove down (8 hours from Rhode Island) to see us and visited with us for a little bit.  We played some crazy party games Friday night, while we were all together.

 Here's Anna playing the spinning toilet paper game

Most of us ended up playing that...so dizzy!

 

Anna recovers

We played some other fun games...and then tried to get cookies from our foreheads into our mouths.  Some people actually did it successfully.  Not so much me.

And onto the big day.  My parents watched the little people while we were in the temple at the ceremony.  It was in the 50s or low 60s I think.  Balmy for this time of year.  :)  And warm enough to be outside.

Anna and her cousin Olivia.  They had so much fun playing together.  They were the only girl cousins at the wedding, so had to stick together.  They are only two years apart, so as they get older they will probably have more and more in common and more fun playing together!  Cousins are the best!

 Selfie of Scott and me

John and Sam and the wedding party plus some friends.  Check out Scott on the right in his tux.  So handsome!  This was at the LDS temple in Washington DC by the way.

 Got my guy back!

 Borrowing a swanky hat from one of the groomsmen

Does he look like the Monopoly Man?

 Matthew thought he should have his picture taken on the steps of the temple too!

 And at the ring ceremony.

Anna and Lulu (Olivia) waiting and looking cute.

Some ring ceremony pictures.  Sorry, all my pictures turned out bad from this weekend.  Luckily there were lots of people taking good pictures.

 At the end of the ring ceremony

 At the reception and ready to eat.

Matthew and Anna spent a lot of the reception dancing.

Here are some blurry pictures of that...

 They had a great time.  And all of us got up to dance at some point.  Some more than others.

 Anna refueling on cookies at the end

 Grandma Keeler and little John Guptill waiting to send off the happy couple at the end of the reception

 Matthew looked like he wanted to go along with them.

Sorry, I know, blurry.  Sooo, we had lots of fun seeing family and hanging out with everyone.  And I don't have pictures of a lot of our fun times from the weekend, but oh well.  Along with a lot of Scott's family and extended family and my parents, we also got to see my brother John who was out from LA for the week.  So our weekend was packed...and lots of fun.  And before we knew it, we were headed back to Illinois.

We drove the whole way back - 12 1/2 hours ish - in one day.  It was a long day.

And we did run into snow and rain on the way back.  Although not as bad as what we hit on the way there.

We made it out of the storm around Indiana.  Very pretty.

And we got home pretty late at night.  Phew!

Glad we got to go, see lots of family, and made it there and back safely.

Valentine's Day

  Here are just a few pictures from our Valentine's Day.

Matthew, Anna and I figured out how to make these hearts (with the help of an internet tutorial).  I was impressed how well they could do it on their first try.

 

The kids were amazed by these pink heart pancakes.  We had some berry toppings for them too.

 John liked the berry topping

 Scott got to come home a little early from work 'cause of freezing rain

He read the little boys a story when they got up from their naps.

The bus made it safely back to our neighborhood through the icy conditions and the kids were loaded down with Valentine's Day goodies!

And Scott made me chocolate covered strawberries with all different toppings as a Valentine's Day treat.  They were so good!  The Monday after Valentine's Day was originally going to be a day off school but because the school had already taken the maximum amount of snow days, the district scheduled for the kids to go to school on that President's Day holiday to make up for the missed day.  And Scott had the day off work so we planned to have a nice lunch date (as a slightly belated Valentine's Day date) with only TWO children along instead of four.  But school ended up being canceled that day anyway because of more freezing rain.  Sooo, our lunch date plans had to be postponed.  We still had a fun Valentine's Day weekend.

Earning Her Stripes

Anna has been taking karate lessons since the beginning of January and this past week she earned her first stripe on her white belt.  She was very excited!  You can't see the stripe well in this picture since they used white tape (they had run out of black).  They have since replaced the white stripe with a black one.  Plus, she has since earned a second stripe!  She now has the same number of stripes as Matthew - a slight point of contention between the two of them.  They are both still loving karate and on their way to that third stripe!  Great job to both of them!