Birthday Party

We went down to Logan yesterday for Kevin's birthday party. Drew and Owen had been looking forward to it since last Saturday. All week long they would exclaim things like, "We goin' to Kevin's on 'Sataday'!" and "We got a 'berfday' present for Kevin!" and "We makin' a cake for Kevin!"

The party was really fun. I only took a few pictures--I wish I'd gotten more, but oh well. We spent most of the time outside playing on the trampoline (I was jazzed to discover I can still do back flips!), playing basketball and letting our cake digest.

Left: Westley and Owen had a ton of fun jumping on the trampoline. Right: It took Drew a little while to get used to jumping.

Marcus thinks baked potatoes are best enjoyed when eaten like an apple!

I had a lot of fun making Kevin's birthday cake. I sort of borrowed the idea from familyfun.com, and I altered it to fit the occasion. I also altered it to fit my supplies; I had made some cupcakes just for fun a few days earlier, and there was leftover batter--not enough to fill a cupcake pan, so I put it in a bread pan and made a small cake. I decided it was just the right size for a bus, so with a few mini-cupcakes and a lot of frosting, that's what I made.

I originally colored the main part of the cake orange. It was a bit too much. I ended up frosting over it, making the cake extra sugary (and therefore extra delicious). But I was really pleased with how the school bus turned out.

The nickle at the bottom of the picture is for scale.

I wanted to put little stand-up figurines of everyone in our family on the cake. For some reason they don't sell them in stores, so I spent a long time drawing the little bodies, scanning them, tweaking them on the computer, scanning and cropping pictures of everyone, making the faces the right size, printing, cutting, gluing heads onto bodies, and coloring outfits. It probably took a total of five or six hours to do, and one crazy night I stayed up til 3 a.m. But it was a ton of fun to do.

I call this cake "Kevin's Perfect Day." It represents Kevin arriving home from school (which he loves), being greeted by everyone in the family. He loves being surrounded by the entire family (if we have a get-together and not everyone can come, Kevin spends most of the time talking about whoever isn't there). And of course, the cake part represents the perfect food to have at a family gathering.

The final product turned out pretty nicely. Green frosting went much better with the school bus than the rotten salmon color I had on there before. I wish I had planned the layout of the people and the writing a little better, though. Between the people and the bus I wrote "happy 21st birthday," then on the bottom I wrote "we love you." I left plenty of room for all the people, but didn't think I'd have room for anything else so I wrote Kevin's name on the roof of the bus. Turns out after I put the people on there was just enough room for candles (not 21 of them, though; we didn't want to light the people on fire), which I was thinking we might have to skip or put in the ice cream or something. I had so much fun making this cake. I'm already on the quest for cake ideas for Samantha's first birthday, which is only two weeks away!

21? Really?

My baby brother turned 21 today! Hard to believe. I remember arriving home from kindergarten on the bus the same day he came home from the hospital. There was a big sign in front of our house that proclaimed, "It's a boy!" My bus driver, an old man who liked to make what he considered to be funny jokes, asked me, "What's a boy?" I just rolled my eyes at him and said in my most exasperated voice, "My new baby brother is a boy!" Then I hopped off the bus and ran as fast as I could to go meet little Kevin.
Kevin has been such a blessing for our family. We've learned so much from him and the example he sets with all his challenges--he deals with Autism, seizures and diabetes, yet he's almost always happy and always concerned about the well-being of others.

This is the closest I have to a baby picture of Kevin. He was such a cute baby!

Kevin and me, sometime in the '90s, shooting Roz with a water gun as she took our picture.

Kevin, age 9 or 10.

I can't, for the life of me, remember when Kevin graduated; but it was a couple or a few years ago...

Kevin loves to run track with Special Olympics. He also enjoys bowling and basketball.

Kevin is a fantastic uncle; Drew and Owen are always talking about playing cars with Kevin. (That's Kevin holding Samantha the day she was born, and Kevin playing with Drew and the Exersaucer.)

Happy Birthday, Kevin! I love you!

Camping and Four Wheeling

David unexpectedly got two extra days off last week; a costly error in our cell phone service caused him to miss his call to work. He was ticked to put it mildly. We decided to try to make the most of the time off, so we went camping. David's sister and her boyfriend were in town and they had decided to go camping with my in-laws, who go every weekend from late April to mid-September. We just tagged along.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. David and the boys went four-wheeling with the in-laws and "Ezra" (this is what Owen started calling David's sister's boyfriend, even though it sounds nothing like his real name).

Owen and Drew get geared up to go.

David gets geared up to go four-wheeling.

Samantha and I stayed at the camper with David's sister and did as little as possible.

Samantha happily eating Cheetos.

After a long exciting ride (they saw trains, a river, an old restored cabin with old artifacts in it, cows, and horses), everyone came back to camp filthy and happy.

Owen and Grandpa arrive back at camp.

Drew, covered in dirt after his ride.

Owen goes to give Grandma back her cell phone and Walkie Talkie

Drew and Owen spent the rest of the afternoon happily playing with pails and dirt.

The in-laws know just about everyone at the campsite (since they've been going there every weekend of every summer for the last few years). On Saturday nights, they have a potluck. Since they don't really plan anything, we ended up with lots of food to choose from: two large pans of lasagna, steaks, hot dogs, home-grown corn on the cob, two different versions of green salad, and garlic toast. I had some of everything. And of course we had S'mores for dessert.

We sat around the campfire for a while, then I got the boys and Samantha ready for bed and we said goodnight to everyone. Drew was walking around saying goodnight to Grandma and Grandpa. He got too close to the fire pit and burned his hand on it. I whisked him up and took him to the faucet to run cold water on his hand. It didn't look too bad, and he didn't complain about it, but now, two days later, I see that it's a pretty bad burn (second degree), so we've been putting Vitamin E on it.

We put a tent up outside the camper and slept in it. It was a rough night. Samantha had to sleep in her car seat, which was really uncomfortable for her, because she prefers to sleep on her tummy and it just doesn't work in a car seat. So she woke up at 1 a.m. Her crying woke up Drew and Owen, and they decided they wanted to sleep between David and me, so I ended up sleeping on the ground between two air mattresses.

Finally, I decided to move up to the other air mattress (it was one of the tall mattresses, but it wasn't as comfortable as our low-to-the-ground one), but in doing so I woke Samantha. I grabbed her out of her seat and let her sleep next to me on the air mattress. I really dislike sleeping next to kids and babies. I'm always afraid of squishing them. So every time Samantha snuggled up to me I backed up until eventually I was on the very edge of the mattress smooshed up against the side of the tent with all kinds of cold air coming in and chilling me. It was a long night.

Drew and Owen woke up early. As soon as it got a little bit light, they were up and wanting to play in the tent. They woke Samantha up. She was still tired and therefore a little grumpy, but she didn't want to go back to sleep because Drew and Owen actually wanted to play with her. So after a lot of kids' squawking and parents' grumbling, we decided to just get up. We went into the in-laws' camper, where the heater was going full blast and the cocoa was steaming.

We got everybody dressed and headed to town for breakfast. We went to a little place called Amy Lou's Steakhouse. The gal that runs the joint, Amy Lou, is older, maybe in her late sixties. She was there by herself when we first got there, and one of the customers was taking orders and serving water to people who came in. Finally the real waitress arrived and the customer was able to sit and enjoy her own breakfast (hopefully she didn't have to pay for it).

When we got back to camp it was time to pack up and head home. It was a fun trip and I was glad we were able to go, even though the circumstances of why we were able to go were much less than ideal. Hopefully we'll get to go camping more than once next summer!

Bribes, Threats and Apples

It feels like Fall. I even had to put a jacket on yesterday! It's making me a little sad, 'cause Fall leads to Winter. Another thing about Fall that makes me sad is all the apples that fall off our tree. We spend a long time every fall, cleaning them up. Yesterday we tried to get a jump start on it, to get the apples raked, then mow the lawn under the tree, then rake some more... If the apples were any good it might be worth all the work, but the apples aren't very tasty and they're full of worms. They'll make great snacks for my dad's sheep and donkeys, though!

We made the boys help us pick up all the apples yesterday. They were glad to help for the first few minutes, but 30 gallons of wormy apples (that we kept telling them not to eat) is a lot of work. We told them that once we were all finished cleaning up apples, we'd all have some ice cream. That kept them going for a few more minutes, but they were soon sidetracked again. We reminded them of their ice cream reward, but they didn't care. So we told them if they didn't resume cleaning, they could go to their rooms and go to bed. That got them going again, but the rest of the time cleaning apples sounded something like this:

Me: Drew! Get that apple out of your mouth! Owen! Do you want ice cream or do you want to go to your room?

Owen: I don't have to go to my room.

David: Then start cleaning.

Drew: I want ice cream.

Me: Then put these apples in the bag. Get that out of your mouth!

[Scene repeats over and over, ad lib]

The boys were sort of confused as to why we were being so demanding; after all, they hadn't made the mess. When they get older we might explain to them that we just want them to be responsible, hard workers. But I think it might go over their two-year-old little heads, so for now we continue in our overbearing ways, getting our yard cleaned through child labor.

A Picture Post

I have a container of coins sitting on the table in our entryway. One day I noticed it was feeling a little light. I figured Drew and Owen had done something with all that spare change, but it wasn't until a few days later that I figured out what.

I went out to get the mail and when I came back I noticed Owen looking through this little hole in our window screen (see the little circle around his left eye? That's the hole) that the cat started and the boys made worse. (This is a reenactment; it's not like I take my camera with me to get the mail.)

Suddenly the idea came to me to look down. There, on the ground below the window was all the change that had gone missing, along with some headphones, a marker and a few other random items.

David had been hounding me for a while to get some pictures of the kids to send to grandparents (I've been hounding him for a while to get a family photo, but he insists that the grandparents don't want to see us, just our kids). Here are some of the results from the photo shoot:

I got this cute picture of Samantha, but I wanted to see if I could get an even better one. I guess I was being greedy and she wasn't having it. She'd rather eat wormy apples off the ground than sit and smile.*

Drew sat really well for me and even smiled when I asked him to. Though, at first it was hard to get him to smile a more natural smile rather than the crazy grin that accompanies saying "cheese." Drew had seen Owen's photo shoot and wanted to do some silly shots as well.

Owen gave me more silly shots than non-silly, but I was able to get this really good one of him just smiling nicely. I had to tuck his hair behind his ears; I need to just cut it, but don't really have the courage or patience to deal with all the screaming.

*The phrase "sit and smile" gives me the giggles. Here's why:
This was my favorite brand of toilet paper in Thailand. Not that it was incredibly soft--it was about average, but just the name of it made me smile.