Guest Blogger: The Birthday Party by Teach (and Mom)

Baby Doll is so cute! (Totally unrelated pic...)

Scout’s turning six here shortly and we decided to have a birthday party for her.  I’m not sure what made Mom decide upon a farm animal theme… but, that’s what we got and it turned out to be spectacular! I was told about these masks some time on Saturday and we didn’t actually start working on them until about 8:30 on Sunday night. 

Mom and I created an example of each one and then made four kits per animal.  We had a dog, cow, pig, horse, lamb and duck.  The lamb was totally my own design.  Mom mostly created the horse. The duck was collaborative and the rest were slight variations from templates found online.  It was super fun. 

Speaking of… we listened to this song about 50 times while doing it.  Curly even started to sing along! “And you kiss the dog on the eye!”  Not quite, but close enough. The birthday party was today… but we’ll fill you in on that tomorrow! Which mask is your favorite? I’m absolutely in love with all of them!

            My Turn!

Teach makes me sound like this was a stupid idea, but now I want to tell you how it went down. Scout wanted to invite all her neighborhood friends and all of her school friends to her birthday party. I have been stressing about this party for about three weeks because I just couldn’t come up with a boy/girl theme I could do inside because the weather might be dicey. Oh, and it had to be really cool because we did the carnival thing for Sport and the magic show for Crafty. Lastly, it had to be cheap. It was a pretty tall order and with all the craziness around here, I felt pretty brain dead.


So I did what I always do in these desperate situations,
I resorted to saying a little prayer.
OK, it was a lot of prayer! And after a couple of days of that, it was all laid out for me in my brain, all at once. The invites were homemade and invited the kids to come and “play” at Scout’s birthday party. Then we made the animal masks and the Drama Queen dressed up as Old McDonald.

We ended up with 21 kids and after making the masks they played Duck Duck Goose, Farmer in the Dell, and a few other “animal” games. Then we split them into groups and let them perform the Old McDonald song on the stage. We even filmed them so I can make DVDs to send home with them all next week. The Drama Queen made balloon animals and we had cupcakes with marshmallow-shaped dogs that she designed all by herself. It’s so nice to have such creative daughters!

I actually think it was one of the best, most organized parties we have ever done. We finished up with 3 minutes to spare and all the kids seemed to have fun and there was no blood. I handed them treat bags with tootsie rolls and “play”doh on their way out the door. All for less than ten bucks total and a few random supplies I already had! It just doesn’t get any better than that…and yeah, I’ll be hitting my knees again tonight.


PS We have so many cute pics of the party I'll put up more tomorrow on Scout's birthday post.

Ta Da! Introducing Countertops

I promised you an update on my kitchen situation…

If you remember correctly, Princess tried to give me a jump start by smacking a metal ruler down on the kitchen counter. You can read the entire story here, but basically her prank led to a new cooktop and that led to new countertops. It’s kind of like that book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…where one thing leads to another and that leads to something else…you get the idea.

The first day was spent sanding off the old laminate countertops. By then there was no turning back. We set up a rickety folding table in the kitchen and it became the temporary home to all my appliances and the pots and pans that used to reside in the cupboard under the cooktop. Planning to feed this large crew suddenly became extremely difficult!

Then it was time to putty and prime. Faux granite is rather interesting. You “paint” on the rocks. This was almost like trowel work because it is so thick. Since the Gym Rat and Gamer both work at Kwal Paint, we got this “granite” paint back in the summer for practically nothing because they were discontinuing the line. That also meant that when my sweetie started running out because it was going on too thick that we couldn’t possibly get any more.

Fortunately, my sweetie is amazing and he came up with a brilliant beyond brilliant plan. Rather than make the edges look like stone he would buy a strip of oak and paint it black with gold flecks in it. This required a major change of plans...

By this point I was really starting to stress. I had my girl scouts coming over on Friday to cook some Thanksgiving-type treats and it was already Wednesday. But my sweetie pulled it off and on Thursday afternoon, I was able to put the kitchen mostly back together.

Anyway, what promised to be a three-day project turned into about seven days. Oh, and then he said the urethane recommended a seven-day hardening period. That didn’t happen. And I still have a rickety table set up in my kitchen…



So what do you think?

Birth Story - Teach

Teach

I guess it’s time for another birth story. Imagine if you will that the year was 1991. School was out for the summer, but that didn’t make a difference to me and mine. I had three little ones and two of them attended a Montessori school that was year-round. My littlest one was in residential daycare near my work. I was fortunate to be able to leave work a couple of times every day to nurse her that is until I got pregnant with number four.

Usually nursing had kept my babies spaced about two years apart. Not that time. It was the first of June and the Drama Queen wouldn’t be 2 until mid-August. We had moved into our first home in February and we finally felt like a real family. Teach was due on June 1, but we had never had a baby arrive when it was supposed to, so we decided to attend the wedding one of my sweetie’s best high school buddies in Utah County. It was only an hour from the hospital and my doctor and I have never been known to have quick deliveries.



The wedding was at the Bride’s residence up in the foothills of Provo. I remember lots of bumps and quite a few hills and plenty of discomfort. I didn’t mention any of this to my sweetie since I knew he was anxious to reconnect with his friend. The reception was beautiful and any other time it would have been fun, but not in my current state.

slightly scandalous...

As we were walking back to the car, I casually mentioned to my sweetie that maybe we should just drive straight to the hospital. He looked alarmed and I reassured him that the pains were regular but still quite a ways apart. I was sure we had plenty of time.

We climbed in the car and made the trip back to the Salt Lake valley in record time. We got off the freeway on 8th South and headed east. That’s when I remembered that we didn’t have my bag with us. That meant no reading material or food. I don’t know if all hospitals are like this, but in Utah, it was strictly forbidden to feed a mom in labor. With my first I was SOOO hungry by the time she was born. I had fasted for almost 24 hours by then. After that I got smart, I tried to eat before I arrived at the hospital.

We pulled into a Smith’s parking lot and hurried inside. The pains were coming closer now and even though I was pretty sure I still had hours to go, I was becoming rather uncomfortable and the thoughts of walking the aisles of a grocery store were not making me happy. We quickly grabbed some snacks and my sweetie chose a random novel off the book-rack and we headed for the checkout. Five minutes later we were back in the car and on our way to the hospital.

This was the first time I was asked about students in my hospital room and being the kind and generous person I try to be, I decided that I could put up with one more person crashing our little party in the name of education. So our nurse was accompanied by a student nurse, but both of them proved to be rather incompetent.

I’ve always been a monitor-watcher and the peaks and valleys in my baby’s heartbeat were making me awfully nervous. They kept assuring me all was well, but they finally called the doctor. When he arrived he took one look and called for the tray to do a c-section. Boy did those nurses move then!


Fortunately, Teach chose just that moment to make her presence known and she forced her way into the world. And I do mean forced! She was my biggest baby at 10 pounds 1 ½ ounces. We totally missed the newborn stage. I had to put her in 3-month clothes from the very first day. She had beautiful silver hair and my doc called her a Silver Fox. That was the first and last time I allowed students in my delivery room. Oh, and Teach missed her due date by a few hours…she was born on June 2.

Mom and Son Social

Who could resist this face?

On Wednesday afternoon, Sport brought home a half-sheet of yellow paper. Yellow usually means PTA, so I try to covertly dispose of them before the kids get a chance to read them. Not that I have anything against PTA, in fact you know that we LOVE the Reflections program. It’s just that they usually want me to volunteer for something or participate in something and I would rather know what I’m getting into before the kids know about it. 

Unfortunately, Sport was all over this one…the Mom and Son Social. If we could have put off going through the backpack papers for just one more day we could have missed this one. <sigh>  I avoided the subject for the rest of the evening, hoping that by the time school was out on Thursday that he would have forgotten all about it. Not this time! The kids at school were all talking about it and what they were going to wear. Did I mention that this was a “cowboy” social? I spent my after school hours doing what I always do, chasing to the dance studio, making dinner, and helping with homework. At 6:20 Sport strode into the kitchen in his cowboy attire…a button-up shirt and his scout vest turned inside out. He even managed to scrounge up a cowboy hat. I didn’t have time to change even if I had cowboy attire, so we headed out the door, dropped Scout at the dance studio and stopped a few minutes later at the elementary school. 

We even got two pictures!

The parking lot was beyond full so we hoofed it a block or so down the street. Lots of other moms were escorting their boys although most of them looked suspiciously like older sisters… As we entered the gym, I felt terribly out of place. There were chairs lining the entire room, cowboy music blaring from a huge sound system, and two long lines…one for ice cream and one for pictures. Boys were chasing and fighting and playing tag. Moms were seated in the chairs trying to visit over the confusion. Sport wanted to get in the ice cream line right away. When we finally got to the table, we were each served a chocolate sundae with a plastic spoon. We slid past the game of stomp-on-the-other-guys’-foot tag and found a couple of seats in the corner. You know the problem with a social…neither one of us are social. It took Sport about a minute and a half to down his bowl of ice cream. As he looked around for the trash can, I hopefully suggested that maybe it was time to leave. He glanced around, looking for a familiar face besides mine. “They said there were games,” he replied. That’s about when we noticed there was a hula-hoop contest going on in the corner. Not my cup of tea. But we wandered over anyway and stood in the picture line. There were at least 40 moms ahead of us. Their boys must be the ones chasing each other up and down the hallway. After the hula-hoops, they announced a Conga line. I finally convinced Sport I would hold our place in line and he could join in. The line broke up about 10 seconds after he hooked up and they began doing the Hokey Pokey. When they switched to the Limbo, Sport sidled up beside me in the line. Twenty minutes later we were posing for the camera. (The nice lady even loaned me a pink hat.) 

Even though the party was in full swing, I was more than ready to hit the road. Sport looked longingly at the ice cream line that had gotten much shorter. I glanced around. Big sister-moms were doing a line dance that I didn’t know. Their sons had huge adoring smiles on their faces. I needed one of those. “Go for it!” I agreed and nodded toward the ice cream table. Sport grinned a mile wide and rushed to the front of the line. When he returned a couple of minutes later, bowl in hand, he said, “I’m ready to go.” Really? I could have put him through the ice cream line a second time much sooner if only I had known. Better still, I could have picked up a half-gallon at the store and avoided the whole thing. But then I would have missed making a fool of myself with the Chicken Dance and I think I’m looking pretty good in my borrowed hat…what do you think?