Weekly Wrap-Up - March 27

Obviously the "big news" this week would be that we celebrated all 3 children's birthdays yesterday.  Yesterday was Little Bit's 2nd birthday, and tomorrow is the twins' 8th birthday, so we celebrated all 3 birthdays yesterday.

The plan was for all the grandparents, and hopefully some other family to be here but the way things worked out, only Mama & Papa were able to come. We still had a nice time though.  Mama & Papa got here on Wednesday and helped us with some projects around here on Thursday and Friday.

Thursday evening we took the girls to California Pizza Kitchen to celebrate their birthday (you can sign up on the CPK website and they send you a coupon for a free kids meal in the child's birthday month. We had the big girls signed up but hadn't signed Little Bit up. But the waitress was able to give us the birthday deal for her too).


Friday we made birthday cakes.  The big girls used the mini 3 tier cake pans I got awhile back and each made their own miniature 3 tier cake, and decorated their own cakes.  A decided on a "Schleich theme" and frosted her cake with cream cheese frosting made using powdered Sucanat instead of refined sugar (which results in brown frosting), then added green frosting for "grass" and stuck various smaller Schleich animals into her cake.

L had a more varied theme to her cake . . . she wanted to incorporate her love of Schleich, American Girl AND knitting.  She's also not a fan of the Sucanat cream cheese frosting so we made regular cream cheese frosting for her. Then she decorated the bottom layer  for American Girl. The original plan was to pipe red stars around it, but she was having some struggles with the frosting so we decided to cut some of the signature stars out of an AG box instead. Worked well and was much easier, hee hee. The second tier, was for Schleich animals so like A, she used the smaller animals, and green frosting for grass. The tiny top layer was her "knitting" layer. She put brown (sucanat frosting) knitting needles on top and then used pink frosting to make "yarn".  As I heard the girls making their plans I had my doubts but figured it's their cakes, they can do what they want, but they actually turned out really cute.

My original plan for Little Bit's cake was to make a green sheet cake and put plastic Sesame Street figures on it. Then I discovered that Amazon, Walmart & the Dollar Store no longer carry cheap small plastic Sesame Street figurines like were readily available when the big girls were toddlers. So I broadened my search to include Sesame Street, Dora, or Blues Clues. Still no luck . . . finally at TJ Maxx I found a bathtub toy set that was Elmo & Ernie with some stacking boats, and since it was at TJ Maxx it was in my price range. So I used the Elmo & Ernie and one of the boats on the cake and then A suggested that we use some of the Schleich (and similar) sea creatures as well.  MY suggestion was to use Little Bit's sharks and have Elmo falling out of the boat about to be eaten by the sharks, but we thought that might be inappropriate LOL. So we stuck with a more family-friendly theme and just had a pod of dolphins swimming toward the boat with both muppets safely inside. I think it turned out pretty cute.

So that was our fun on Friday.  Sabbath morning as soon as we woke up the big girls started singing Happy Birthday to Little Bit. The first thing she did, upon hearing this was look at me & say "cake?" which I assured her we'd have after church. She also quickly picked up the "tune" and spent the rest of the day saying "Happy . . . to me".

After lunch, and Little Bit's nap, we had presents. Little Bit's at the fun age where the best part is ripping the paper off . . . she kept saying "more pesants" hee hee.

As always, our very spoiled children came away from birthday with way too much stuff, but a good time was had by all.

One completely unexpected gift for the big girls was an iTouch for each of them. They are understandably fascinated with our smartphones and think it's terribly unfair that *I* can have suduko, spider solitaire, a book reader, etc at my fingertips everywhere we go, but they can't (since there's 3 children and I have one phone I rarely "share" and if I do, it's usually with Little Bit) so it occurred to me that an iTouch is, essentially,a smart phone minus the phone (and monthly fee). We got them older model, used ones, but they're thrilled. The picture above is just after they opened them, I was explaining what it was & it was all starting to sink in what they'd just received LOL.

Little Bit's "big gift" was a balance bike. It's still a tad too tall for her, but she still had fun with it. Notice the heavy winter coat, sigh . . . March is definitely going out like a lion this year!

So that was the birthday celebration.

Earlier in the week L was abit worried, we hadn't seen her cat, Socks for 2 or 3 days and she was starting to get pretty worried. The girls decided they needed to form a search party. They got out their "communicator watches", convinced Papa to go with them, and Mama to be "command central". Drew a map of our property and proceeded to search, complete with "checking in" with Mama on their watches as they finished each "checkpoint". It was pretty cute to listen to them, sounded like they got a LOT of exercise. But didn't find Socks. He came home on his own the next day, whew! Since there was a happy ending, the whole planning and executing of the search party was a pretty good learning activity!

Otherwise, not alot happened this week, we were kind of preoccupied with the birthday stuff.