Campout Birthday Party

Peyton wanted to celebrate her fifth birthday with her friends by doing one of her favorite things... CAMPING!! So how do you have a camping birthday party with a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds? At our local Riparian Preserve http://www.riparianinstitute.org/riparian.cfm. We love visiting this park to go on hikes, feed the ducks, and play in the unique structures that you just don't find at regular parks. This pictures were taken by Carrie and April since I was a little busy managing the troops. We did some rubbings. Not sure many of the kids had done this before so it was really cool to see how excited they got when the images transfered onto their papers. We talked about the different images on our hike back to our campsite. Before going on our hike I gave out trail mix and juice boxes for all the kids. (I wanted to make up our own trail mix, but it was easier to just get the pre-made ones for this party. While hiking back to the site we talked about all the different birds we were seeing and some of the plants. This wonderful park has a few large campsites you can reserve to stay the night. We used the campsite as a base for our birthday party and later had a few families stay all night long with us. I let the kids explore on their own after we got back from our hike. We set up a tent and the kids played in that too. We made a pinata for the camping party. We looked and looked for one Princess P liked, but decided to surf the net for some ideas on how to create our own. After browsing a few ideas..(sorry forgot where those sites are) we came up with a plan. Make a tent out of a card board box. Basically we took the sides of a box a put them together making a triangle, Princess P and Daddy painted it green on Daddy Date Night. A then later my oldest put some tissue fringe on it to complete it! This all cost about a $1.
The kids loved hitting the piñata.... (note to self-when foretting eye cover use a gift bag... oh my goodness!!) I got some binoculars and a compass and put together a little bag of smores for the gift bags. We added the candy for the pinata that the kids scooped up too. Heading back to pick up area we hiked to the bridge to feed the ducks. I bought a big bag of bird seed and filled up cups for each of the kids. The ducks went CRAZY for this. Finally, we let the kids play in the dinosaur dig area. It's a big covered sand area with some dinosaur bones barried that the kids can uncover or discover!
The kids loved it! Here are some snapshots of our night too. Yummy smores and all

Valentines... 2012

I had such good intentions, but with everyone sick.. this is all I got. Kids made letters with paint and spelled LOVE... we used their feet for the v. Heres what we did...

Halloween 2011

I made our costumes this year... Yip Yip's from Sesame Street. Of course the little ones decided they wanted to be the Yip Yip's cats.


I got the idea for the Yip Yip's from Martha Stewart's web site. Things to note... costumes were horrible to actually trick or treat in because they were hot and hard to see out of. I wanted to save money so found some blankets from garage sales to use that was way cheaper than buying at store. I love to recycle costumes!! We used pool noodles for the mouths... much easier than stuffing with pillow stuffing. Oh and by the way... no sewing just lots of hot glue. There are some good u tube instructions out there too.

Summer 2010

Challenges of the summer.

The first challenge for the summer was attending Jr. High Camp with our church! Really it was no challenge, but I didn't know how working with the Jr. High kids would be. God has shown me they need the silliness of life before they too start facing the challenges of this world. So for the summer I have decided to work with the Jr High ministry and see if I can give them a little silliness and love. Not sure what God has in store for this new challenge, but I feel the tug at my heart, so I'm jumping in!

I'm starting to read, The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. Just in the preface I'm realizing this book could an amazing read. I'm not sure how much I will be able to dive in, but I'm going to give it a shot. The very first part is already shedding some light from some of those questions in life that you just seem to question, but not really question. Can there be just one true religion? So you see how deep this book will be and I'm hoping I can stay with it.

The third challenge of the summer has come with the health issue.... again. My mother has cancer again.... yes.... again. This will be the 4 time and 3 kind of cancer. She is an amazing fighter for life! I feel God's comfort with this area.... I'm not sure if it's because I have given it up the Lord or because I'm not facing it. But for now I'm at peace with it. But once again my memory seems to be leaving so the blogging must start again. We had a wonderful day swimming with her and all the grandkids. It was a good day.

The fourth challenge of the summer will be my floors.... they are a mess and I am going to try to make a plan and attack them. This may fail, but I'm sick of them and something must be done!

So summer... here I come!

Dec 2009? What???

Our turkey centerpiece.

How did December come so fast this year? WoW, time is just flying by! We did have a wonderful thanksgiving with a last minute change of Amanda and Chris coming home for the holiday! What a joy it was to see them and have the whole family here for thanksgiving. The added bonus was finding a new house for them just ten minutes away... another 10 days and they will be making their move back to Arizona.

We have been doing some holiday traditions along the way in December... we went and saw Santa at the mall and danced with Mrs. Claus and listened to her read the book The Night Before Christmas. Princess P was totally into dancing and listening to the book. She even won a prize! Mrs. Claus said she thought she was just the cutest thing dancing with her!



I was not very happy with the Santa people this year! They would not allow me to take my own photos, even though I bought some of their one shot photos! I love capturing the kids with Santa and him chatting about their list... but no I get one photo that doesn't fit in my photo book properly because of the way the take the picture! ERRRRR!! I "accidently" took one photo of the kids on his lap, unfortunately the kids did not know I was sneaking it in and a couple of them we not looking at the camera. I did send them an email telling them that we will not be back unless they change this policy.

The house is coming along with our decorations... the tree is up... the kids did a wonderful job of decorating again this year. I love that they can do most of the decorating and they explore all the ornaments and the memories of the "special ones". I got the stockings hung and my door is decorated. Poor Tyler can't seem to get the lights on the house yet because he had to clear out the branches off the tree in the front yard. Boy do those mesquite trees grow like weeds!
Here are some holiday spots in our house.





Opps... these are Christmas Crafts we are working on.... gifts....