Birthdays! Birthdays!

Wohoo Birthdays! I love birthdays! We had some very fun times this month (sorry about the glare, we had a lot of sun that day and my camera doesn't do well with the sun :=).

Emma decided she wanted a red velvet cake from Costco. That's her favorite. We did her presents and cake in the morning, then we went to the park for a couple of hours since the weather was so beautiful. We have all been learning to play basketball and spent most of our time on the court there.

Then we went to lunch at our Burger King that has a play ground and hung out there until it was time to head out to the roller skating rink for their public skate from 3 - 5. She has been begging to go roller skating since Joelle got to go with the Youth. We had so much fun!!!! Though we had a camera for all of this, we never took a picture. We filmed a lot though and David is going to work on posting some of that.

It was HILARIOUS to watch Ben, Jake and Katie learn to skate. Katie was brave and thought she had it all figured out and didn't need help, though she totally did. Jake fell once and then spent of the rest of the time mostly sitting and eating cotton candy and popcorn or being EXTREMELY careful. Ben did a great job. He totally figured out the skating thing though he fell plenty of times. During the last song he fell hard on his head and wasn't sure how he felt about skating anymore (even though he was telling me it was the best birthday ever about 5 mins. before that). I wish we could have skipped that last song :=). He still says it was super fun and is ready to try again next time.
I can't believe she is 11 years old.





I love this picture. Jake spent a lot of time looking for the perfect present for her. He is a great gift giver. He settled on a beautiful ring that she loves. He love it because "it sparkles no matter where you walk with it :)". He loved shopping for her and I admit it was fun for me too.
This little guy turned 9 this year. CRAZY!! He is such a sweet, handsome little man. He decided he wanted to try Laser Tag for his birthday. He loves Nerf guns and couldn't wait to get a chance to shoot Dad with something that would keep track of it :). - As a side note, he has started falling in love with fancy cars too, which is really fun when we go out. He is always spotting the flashiest cars.
So after his morning cake of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and presents we were off to play Laser tag. It was AWESOME (albeit, very expensive)! We were the only ones there since it was the middle of a school day (the best perk of homeschooling). We played for an hour sneaking around and shooting each other in the dimly lit, foggy room. I don't think I have had that much fun since we went roller skating (wink, wink).

For anyone interested, Joelle had the top score followed closely by David. I came in second to last. Just above Katie who didn't even play in the second round. She just ran around with me. I guess that means I actually lost. How humiliating :).

We went to Burger King again for lunch and then came home and watched Narnia which he had gotten that day (we already had the last 2 movies, but had never bought the first - who knows why - Ben has been asking for it forever). It was a wonderfully fun couple of weeks.

Blue and Gold

Ben had his first Blue and Gold Banquet at the beginning of March. He loved it! He has so much fun doing all his cub scout stuff with his dad :). David is so good at helping Ben. He decided he wanted he wanted a Skylander cake and David, being who is, figured it out. All of the kids had fun watching Dad make this cake. Each of the sides had something to do with the figure on that part of the cake. The top were all the flyers, they were supposed to be in the sky :).
The Fire side was the favorite of the cub scouts. You can't hardly see the figure in this picture because he blends in with the cake so well. Ben was so proud of his cake (that is 4 cake mixes by the way, and since every boy makes a cake you can imagine how much cake we brought home). The bottom half was strawberry cake which Ben had to have. David and I decided we are not big fans of that flavor :). Poor folks who had it at the party. Hopefully they looked past the cake and just enjoyed the secret recipe icing :).
The wolves were in charge of the skit and Ben got to be the MC for it. He had it memorized but at the last minute decided he couldn't go up without his paper. He read it, but he still did a great job.

It was the "ugliest man" skit. There is a boy behind the curtain and the MC asks all the boys to dare to look at the ugliest man. They all scream, faint and fall down as they look. Then the MC asks for the cub master to come up. When he looks behind the curtain the boy back there screams and faints. It was really cute.
Ben earned his Wolf badge that night. We were all so proud.
I sent David up instead of myself since I have never even opened his scout book. Hurrah for "Captain America!"

Let's have an LPS party!

The other day the kids decided to have a party with all their Littlest Pet Shop toys. They are always making movies with these little guys (which they are in the process of editing to put on you tube. You would not believe how many people do this :). This time they just wanted to decorate and have fun. They used all these fun scarves and things that the owners of our house left here to play dress up with. It made for a very fun party.
They created this little doorway and had a blast going through it.

Not sure what this area was?
Oh, apparently this is the food court. Those are all the play dough things they made from the previous post :).
Again, not quite sure what is going on here? But look at all the party goers.
Most of these pics were taken by Jacob and Katie. They still love the camera.

Katie has discovered chocolate syrup. Heaven help us :).

This was Emma's favorite birthday present. I love this floating body shot from Katie.
She loves the camera.


I think Ben might have taken this himself. I just thought it was funny.

Apparently Emma was pretending to slap Jacob. Not sure how I feel about this :).
No comment :=)
Love It! He, he.
I don't know who got this picture, but Samson is very hard to get looking at the camera so I just had to add it.