Mustache Party

I really don't know when or where my obsession infatuation with mustaches began.

Looking back at some of my old blog posts,

there's this post about our family talent show act dancing with stick-on mustaches to the Funky Monkeys' song "Mustache."

And this post with my boys' green smoothie mustaches.

And this post with Ryan in full mustache and eyebrows.

I think you get the idea.

April 2013 marked a pretty big milestone in Evan's life ~ he turned 10 years old!  Double digits!  I cannot even believe it's been 10 years since we were blessed with our first....

Anyway....what better way to celebrate than to have a Mustache Party?!?

It was just our family, so I knew I could be goofy.  They don't expect anything less.

I downloaded and cut out these great mustaches that I used to string from the ceiling to the half wall between the family room and kitchen.  This photo makes them look a little like bats, but in real life, they  were pretty cool.

I also used these mustaches to adorn our photos hanging on the wall.

There was a mustache cake.  Yes, you must turn your head to view.  For some reason, this pic didn't stay rotated in the upload??

And straws with mustaches.

Oh, and of course, EVERYONE had to put on a mustache at the start of the party.

I stole this idea from my niece's 1st birthday party (thanks, Kim!).  I tried to find photos of Evan from every year since his first birthday and strung them up on a clothesline along the mantle.  It was a fun trip down memory lane and makes me realize how quickly my first baby is growing up!  

it's great to be eight!

I cannot believe my first-born is eight years old today.....
well, not officially until 8:47 p.m., but still. 
Where does the time go?
It flies, that's for sure!

It's hard to believe this big second grader was once a 10 lb 5 oz (!!) newborn babe!

Evan celebrated being eight by taking Rice Krispie treats to school. 
Then, for dinner, he requested chicken pockets
followed by blueberry coffee cake with strawberry ice cream. 
Yum-o!

Here are some facts about our BIG 8 year old...

Number of missing teeth: 7

Number of Happy Birthday calls received today: 4

And a list of favorites....

sport: baseball and football

book: Curious George

movie: Megamind

TV show: Phineas & Ferb

food: chicken nuggets & mac & cheese

color: blue

teams: Phillies & Eagles

outside activity: playing baseball

Wii game: Super Mario Brothers

Evan, mom and dad are very proud of the smart, thoughtful boy you have grown up to be. 

We pray that you continue to grow into the young man God imagined you'd be way before you were even born. 

We love you higher than the sky!

Happy Birthday, Monkeyhead!

ryan's moonbounce party

On Saturday, we celebrated Ryan's 5th birthday with a "Rock Star" moonbounce birthday party. He has been waiting patiently for 2 years since Evan's moonbounce party to have his own and I don't think he was disappointed! We invited family and friends and everyone had a great time.

I made a guitar cake that Ryan loved ~ the hardest thing about keeping a theme at moonbounce is that they don't let you bring much from the outside in. So, we had rock star invites, a guitar cake and then I had fun putting the party favors together. We decorated white lunch bags with glitter letter stickers, music notes, and stars. Inside, I included some glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars, rock band silly bandz, a box of crayons, bubbles in a guitar-shaped bottle, and lollipops.

Uncle Jim jumping with Abby

Our friend, Marty, and his three boys

Cousins-in-crime Alex and Ava

The grandparents and the infamous Aunt Cindi :)



Ryan with some of his buddies from preschool

Aunt Megan & Uncle Jim

Alex


Coloring....isn't that what everyone wants to do at a moonbounce party?

Blowing out the candles

Opening gifts back at the house

minus Nathan

[he fell asleep on the way home - too much bouncing, I guess]

Happy Birthday, my sweet boy!

My wish for you this year is to enjoy the many firsts that will come with being 5

{and here's to growing a couple of inches, too!}
Love you, Ryan!

happy birthday to ryan!

I cannot believe my Ryan is 5 today!

In honor of my little man's big day, 5 things we love about him:

1. His "I wuv you, mom {or} dad" in the car right before he falls asleep.

2. His creativity and the way he sees things using his imagination.

3. His passion for everything ~ food, playing, fighting, loving, hugging, school stuff.

4. His friendliness ~ he is quite the social butterfly at school and all the teachers know Ryan ~ I think that's in a good way :)

5. How he climbs into our bed every morning to give hugs and snuggles to start our days.

Ryan, we love you, buddy! You exhaust us, but we wouldn't want it any other way :)

Ryan's 4th Birthday

We celebrated Ryan's 4th birthday way back in July with a robot themed birthday party. We collected lots of recyclable junk like bottle caps, lids, Chinese take-out handles, cans, aluminum pull tabs, and popsicle sticks for the kids to use to create their very own robots.

So, what started out looking like this....



Turned out looking like this....
[Note: man in background, is NOT a robot, but my father-in-law] :)

Mark made a robot pinata out of cereal and other food boxes.

And no robot party would be complete without the robot cake, which was fun to make and decorate....

Happy Birthday, little man! I can't believe you're 4 already!!

Speaking of birthdays, here's a scrapbook layout that I just finished about Ryan's 3rd birthday...

I was inspired to do the "party" banner from Chrispea's post and challenge. You still have until next Monday to try one on your own and post it to the Ally Scraps forum and it's a great way to use up some of those scraps I'm sure you've got laying around.

Party of 8

This past weekend, we finally had my friend, Teresa's 35th birthday celebration. Her actual birthday was in February, and the first planned dinner party had to be postponed due to lack of babysitting, so here we are in June.....

Anyway, it was my turn to host and can I just say how fun it was to plan a dinner party???? It's been eons since Mark and I hosted a dinner party sans kids. It was fun to decorate and light candles without worrying about someone getting burned or setting the house on fire. We got out the good china and glassware, served fun cosmopolitans for the ladies, enjoyed cocktails and appetizers on the deck, followed by dinner and desert in the dining room. Heck, we even got to use [for the first time] those fancy wine glass charms we bought in Napa Valley almost 7 years ago!! Dinner was set for 7:30, but half of the party didn't arrive until 8:00 so appetizers didn't happen until 8:30 and we didn't sit down to dinner until close to 10 p.m.

MENU: Salad
Chicken Marsala over pasta

Lemon Herb seasoned green beans

Italian bread

Individual Lemon pudding cakes for dessert

A good [too good] time was had by all.

For some reason, I'm always giving Teresa recipes [not because I'm a good cook or anything] so I decided to make her a recipe box as her birthday gift. I had these great recipe card stamps from Stampin' Up that I had wanted to use for a while [read: over a year] and I love how the recipe cards turned out. The dividers were decorated up with ribbon and I made a "5 star yummy" tag on a paper clip for each section so she could mark her favorite recipes.

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs...

Evan had his first "friend" birthday party last Friday ~ I say "first" because it was actually his first party separate from our usual family celebration. He was allowed to invite 5 friends, so he picked two from school, two from church, and one family friend. When it was time to decide on a theme, we wavered between a camp-out party and a dinosaur party. Personally, I was rooting for the camp-out party, but the dinosaurs won that battle.

It all started with this little egg invitation...

When the boys arrived, they were all given their own adventure hat labeled with their name. They colored in pictures of dinosaurs while we waited for all the guests to arrive.

They cut them out and put them on our dinosaur mural.


Once everyone was there, we played some games.



Started with "Pin the Horn on the Triceratops..."


Continued with Musical Dinosaur Footprints....



And we really kicked it up a notch with "Hot Potato" ~ except we passed a dinosaur.

Time for a change of scenery, so outside we went. Thank goodness we didn't the rain that they were calling for [is it possible that there is any other job in this world where you can be wrong SO often and still have a job???? I digress...]

I had hidden parts of a dinosaur fossil all over the yard and the boys had to follow the clues like a scavenger hunt to find the individual pieces.



Then they had to work together to put the puzzle together...




Here's the completed skeleton. I have absolutely no idea what kind of dinosaur it was ~ found it on the internet ~ but one of Evan's buddies, Bryan, is a dinosaur connoisseur ~ he knew its name after only seeing the first three pieces.

You'd think I'd remember what he called it ~ but, I don't...



After a dinner of dinosaur chicken nuggets, we had our dinosaur dig in the sandbox. I don't have any photos of that because it was complete chaos :) I had hidden some clean, dry chicken bones in the sand and I also found these really cool plastic dinosaur skeletons from Oriental Trading Company that were just perfect. The boys thought they were really cool. Here's a photo from their website so you can get an idea of what they looked like.


Finally, it was time for dinosaur cake.
I even made an ice cream volcano by pouring strawberry syrup
over melting chocolate ice cream.



Followed by gift opening and a dinosaur egg hunt outside....

I think a good time was had by all.
[Dare I say it was "DYNO-mite!" HAHAHAHA ~ yeah, I know, pretty corny]
The kids took home these cute dinosaur mugs filled with dinosaur goodies ~ also from OTC. Should have gotten a photo of them, too ~ especially since they were ready a few days ahead of time, but I didn't think of it :)

Now, we're working on the thank you notes.
Evan is diligently writing each one out himself with a little help from mommy now and then.
Even though this was quite a bit more work than having a party at moonbounce [what we did for his 5th birthday], it was about 1/2 the price and we [I] had fun planning all the activities.
What do you want from an elementary teacher? :)