Sneaky Whiskey in a Jar-O

While we were doing our yard work, we acquired a new pet!  We saw 9 (!) of these little guys. A search on the internet told us he they are rough brown earth snakes and how to take care of one in captivity, so we decided to keep one for a little while so we could learn about his habitat, what he eats and etc.

We named him Sneaky Whiskey in a Jar-O.  Sneaky because of the awesome Sneaky Snake song from our childhood (yep, DMP heard it a lot as a kid too!) and Whiskey in a Jar-O because his first home was a jar, and DMP added the Metallica cover of an Irish song "Whiskey in a Jar" to my "Kid-friendly music that doesn't suck" CD (and yes, Whiskey in a Jar is pretty kid friendly, you know, for a song about robbery and murder with Whiskey in the chorus- it's a good one, though, really!)

We later got Sneaky his own little plastic terrarium and found yummy worms and slugs for him to eat. We kept him about two weeks, but he didn't seem like he was too happy, so we set him free. He was probably the world's least exciting pet, anyway.  Kind of like a pet worm.  Rough earth snakes eat worms and burrow in the dirt, and mostly only come out at night, so we basically never saw him...  In all it was a fun learning experience for the kiddos and now we have a plastic tank ready for the next temporary pet!

Yard Work, Hard Work

This spring break, we finally got around to doing a project we've meant to do pretty much since we moved in.  We have big beds bordering the front and sides of the house that have wood chips in them. There wasn't any fabric under the chips and they were a giant area that was a huge pain to weed.  We decided to dig up the old chips, lay down fabric, and then replace the chips and add new stuff. It took us a day and a half of hard work, but it was worth it- it looks great now!

EJ does NOT like weeding.  It was funny to see how differently each girl reacted to the hard, long work.  EJ was an effective worker, but kept up a steady stream of complaints.  Birdy was cheerful and talkative, but not very effective :)

Bear did his best to "help" wherever and however he could. When he wasn't helping, he was riding his bike or throwing wood chips.

We planted some bulbs around the tree in the front yard...

Everyone got new gloves for the work.  Look at all those dead cannas. They are gone now and the deck looks awesome!

I like to call this "Captain Cowlick vs. Overgrown Hedges".  Doesn't that tool look fun? I'm not supposed to tell you he cut through our 100ft extension cord with it later (don't worry, it was really more of a nick- he taped it up with electrical tape and it is fine. I think.)

EJ really wanted to use the wheelbarrow to help move the wood chips.  We couldn't have done this project without our awesome home teacher! His FIL hooked us up with a deal on the wood chips AND delivered it in his truck and they both helped us unload and spread it out!

And here is the finished product!  Look Ma! No fountain!  There was a fountain where the "dinosaur rock" is in the picture above (do you see it? The dino head rock?)  It was pretty and all, but since it didn't work, it was really just a mosquito breeding ground.  I had to bleach and then bail out nasty scummy water once a week or more from that thing. SOOO glad it's gone!

Cake Wreck

So I told you Birdy's birthday cake deserved a post of its own!  SOO many things went wrong with this cake!  I searched the internets for a great idea for a Rapunzel tower cake and came up with a basic design using cupcakes stacked on a dowel a la Food Network Challenge and a chocolate-covered ice cream cone as the tower top. Easy enough. 

I baked the cakes Friday night, and M and I decorated for the party and I finished up the braid craft on Friday as well.  Saturday morning was our Stake Women's Relief Society conference, so I knew I'd be gone all morning until about 1, so I wanted to leave plenty of time to decorate the cake (and only have to do the cake).  So far so good. 

I decided to try out a new frosting recipe from Pintrest- it was a fail and WAAAYY too thin to decorate with. No panic, though, since my PR training taught me to anticipate a crisis, and I had a plan to dispatch DMP to Walmart to buy frosting from their bakery in the event of frosting failure.  So off he went and I got a call a short time later telling me that they don't sell their frosting and neither does Albertsons anymore.  Sweet.  The frosting aisle DID have Wilton brand butter cream frosting in a can, so I thought that would be great for the kind of decorating I had in mind. 

He brought the frosting home and I started coloring it.  I got some cool new gel colors that come in little squeeze bottles- it came out really, really fast.  No worries, we'd just have VERY green grass and a VERY purple tower!  I got the round cake frosted and the tower assembled and mostly frosted when I licked a little bit of frosting from my finger. I wish I had words to describe the taste. I guess I'll borrow some from Tangled :)  - At first it just tasted like powdered sugar.  Then it tasted like bad man smell, then it tasted like REALLY bad man smell, and then there was an aftertaste of burnt plastic and it all finished off with the taste of dirt (or perhaps the taste of the color brown?).  Seriously.  Two of the Moms who came to the party tasted it and they said "Oh, it isn't that bad... Oh, Oh yuck!". 

So, once we discovered the evil after taste of the frosting, I had visions of 13 little girls pushing their cake away in disgust and decided it had to go.  Luckily, I had a can of blue canned frosting in my stash, and ta da! Yellow and blue make green!  I left the tower with the yucky purple stuff, thinking that no one would eat it and scraped as much of the yucky green off and re-frosted with the new, less yucky frosting. 

I finished building my cupcake tower on my dowel and discovered that my carefully-measured cupcake tower was too short for the dowel.  The cupcakes were already threaded on to it and frosted, so we couldn't easily dismantle it and re-cut.  No problem- DMP came up with the idea to cut the top of the ice cream cone off and we'd stick a little flag on the end sticking out (what are we at- 6? 7? cake-related disasters?).  At this point we noticed that the tower was leaning. A lot. It was only getting worse.  By this time it was 2:45 (the party was at 3:30) so we decided to admit defeat and go buy a cake and stick both little Rapunzel dolls on it and call it a day.  But first, we had to take a picture of our wreck with my sad face (above).

It was just as well we admitted defeat- just as we were documenting the wreck, the tower decided once and for all to give up and it fell PLOP onto the table.  What you see there is the face of a hysterical Mom who has been struggling with a cake for almost 2 hours only to have it end in spectacular failure (although, we decided Bear's monster cake was a bigger wreck, since it actually fell completely apart...).  Also, I was realizing all the work that still had to be done before the guests arrived in just 30 min. 

DMP saved the day with a cake/cupcake from Sam's and the girls were still thrilled and fun was had by all. As my Mom pointed out- I'm now at 2 fail and 1 success for cakes this year (she's always so encouraging!).  I've learned my lesson- on the years that we are throwing a party, I'm going to buy the cake and not stress about it. I'll do a "Mom cake" on the years when we have a more low-key family party.  The failures are bound to be slightly less spectacular that way.

Rapunzel Party

Saturday we had Birdy's "friend" birthday party. I co-hosted the party with another Mom in our ward. Her daughter, Bella, has a birthday just 4 days before Birdy, so we decided that since we were inviting basically the same kids (the girls go to the same school and are in the same church class) we'd just combine our efforts into one party!   We had 13 girls total and it was loud and fun!

When the girls arrived, they got to decorate their Rapunzel braids with flowers and their ribbon of choice.  Then the other mom, M, sprayed them all with gold glitter spray.  They turned out really cute and the girls loved them. I didn't get any pics of the making of them, though- it was too crazy!

As the girls finished decorating their braids, they got to "paint the walls" like Rapunzel did. We were going to have the kids go outside and color with chalk and sidewalk paint on the back driveway, but the day was cold and rainy, so butcher paper taped to the walls was a fun last-minute substitute!

After painting the walls some more, we played "pin the nose on Flynn Rider".  M made that awesome poster. She drew it free hand just from looking at a picture! She is a woman of many talents.  The game was a lot of fun. To keep the girls engaged when it wasn't their turn, I taught them a "once upon a time" cheer- they had to say "Hip Hip Hurrah!" and "Huzzah!" after every girl took her turn :)

We borrowed a friend's carnival game and I got some foam apples from Dollar Tree and we played "Toss the apple to Maximus (the horse in the movie that loves apples).

Then it was time for the kids to gather around the birthday girls to sing and eat CAKE!   I have a WHOLE post about this birthday cake, just you wait :)

How many tries does it take for two newly-minted 6 yr olds to blow out 6 candles? About 5 or 6 :)

Then the girls got to open their loot!

Birdy was so funny to watch open presents. Every single present she opened got this level of reaction. There were giggles, squeals and jumping, too. It was hilarious and totally genuine.  She even got this excited for Bella's presents!

After the presents, we used another friends karaoke machine to entertain the girls while we waited for their parents. It was fun, but I didn't really understand how hard it would be to wrangle 13 girls to do karaoke when everyone wanted to sing at once!

All the birthday party guests and their pretty braids.  EJ was a big help at the party- she helped run the games, passed out cake and ice cream and was generally awesome.  DMP helped a lot to by getting Bear the heck out of the house so we could party without two-yr-old "help".

Here are just a couple of shots of some of our hard work decorating. We had a long Rapunzel braid on the door, so everyone would know they were at the right house (you know, if the bikes and scooters by the door didn't clue them in...)

M did an awesome job painting our 'tower" and then we draped our Rapunzel hair all around the living room. It was made from a dollar store table cloth cut in half and then thumb tacked up end-to-end.  You can see a lot of the other decorations in the other pics- lots of "sun" flags and purple and yellow!

Super Six

Birdy's birthday was on a school day, so she requested to open one present before school. She choose to open her present from Grandma and Grandpa K.  It was a set of She-Ra dolls and she was thrilled!  Then it was off to school with a special-request lunch (sausage and crackers with NO cheese, chocolate pudding, chips and grapes) and treats for her class- lik-a-stiks.  Bear and I surprised her by showing up at lunch with doughnuts (since her lunch is at 10:20!).

After school, we met her at the bus stop with balloons and flowers.  Our sweet bus driver, Miss Alisa, had the whole bus sing Happy Birthday to her on the way home.

 When she got home, she also saw that Mom and Bear had decorated the house and wrapped all her awesome presents! She was so excited and couldn't WAIT until Daddy got home to open them. I let her open the present from EJ so she could play with that and her She-Ra dolls.  Also, that is what she wore for her birthday. I tried to steer her to something that at least matched, but what can you do!

Her special-request dinner was pot stickers, rice with "toy sauce" (what she calls soy sauce), stir-fry veggies, grapes and chocolate milk. This girl sure loves pot stickers and rice!

After dinner it was FINALLY time to open presents! She got quite a haul, as you can see- a deluxe mermaid castle, a squinky play set, lots of puzzles and the Rapunzel music jewelry box she has wanted FOREVER.

We also got a reminder on how hard big sister birthdays are for little two-yr-old siblings. Bear really, really wanted to open a present, or at least get to play with one of the presents that were already opened.  We have basically this same picture of Birdy at EJ's 5th birthday! (click the link and scroll down- it's funny!)

After presents it was time for (store bought) cake and candles! I hope she got her wish, because she sure had a hard time blowing out all SIX of those candles (or "birthday fire" as we call it around here these days, thanks to Bear).

The birthday ended with a special surprise musical number by EJ for her sister. She recently learned how to play "Happy Birthday" on the piano and played it just for Birdy. We weren't allowed to sing, though, since it "messes her up" :)

Vintage DMP: Doppelganger

We dug up some of DMP's old baby pictures because we were curious to see how closely Bear resembled his daddy. It is crazy how alike they look!  This is DMP when he was about 20 months, so younger than Bear.  It is funny, because when I look at his curls, I wonder if Birdy didn't get them from her daddy- her younger crazy-curl days look more like his than my "boing boing" curls!

Here is Bear holding the "Baby Daddy" picture (he loves to see these "baby daddy" pictures).

Hippo Guts Park

 One of the kids' favorite park is one that we call "Hippo Guts" park. The park has this hippo play-thing (above) that you can go inside. There, in the plastic, is labeled, 3D hippo parts- heart, stomach, tongue, etc.  This helps distinguish "Hippo Guts" park from the other park nearby- "The one where we had the Halloween Party".

Aside from the hippo and his guts, this park is next to a little wooded area with trails running through it.  The kids love it and as soon as we get there, Bear asks "Can we go displore the world?" which means explore the trails.  Both times we've walked there we've seen a hawk (once it flew really close to us) and DMP and the kids saw some fish and turtles by the little river that runs through the park.

On the day I took these pictures, it was 84 degrees!  It was so lovely how could we NOT spend 2 hours playing.  When Birdy first got on the swings, she started swinging normally. Then she says to herself- "Wait a minute, this isn't school!" and promptly started swinging with her belly on the seat and then standing up.  Apparently at school you can swing on your bum only, and no jumping out. It was so funny to watch the girls doing all the "forbidden" fun things on the swing- they were almost defiant about it :) 

Then they practiced hanging upside down for a while.  Just as we were about to go home, some of our friends from church showed up. It was a lot of fun and the kiddos were excited to get even more extra park time!