July Holidays

I'm always up for celebrating a holiday, and July is full of them! And since Joseph is old enough to do lots of crafts, we have even more ways to celebrate and decorate!

So, here's some of what we've done this month:

4th of July: Joseph had a few play dates the week before the 4th of July. That was about the time that I realized I ought to decorate, so I had him and his friends help.

With one of his friends, we made patriotic wreaths out of paper plates and flags out of popsicle sticks. With another friend, I added fireworks to Joseph's birthday cityscape out of painted Q-tips. I also changed out the Superman birthday banner for a patriotic banner. One night, I decided that I knew how to make slipcovers, so I made one out of scrap fabric. 

The Saturday before the 4th, Joseph and I gathered wildflowers (one of the vases had pink, white, and lavender flowers that almost looked red, white and blue) and had fun covering the sidewalk with chalk fireworks and the number 4. Overall, I think it helped make the holiday more meaningful, so it was worth the bit of effort we put in. (And then the day of we subjected Joseph to as much Schoolhouse Rock as we could in addition to the pancake breakfast, barbecues, fireworks, etc.)

(Oh. And Joseph celebrated fireworks by not being afraid of them or covering his ears but instead yelling at them in a very manly way from a safe distance.)

7/11 day: We did not go get Slurpees. But we thought about it.

7/12: We did not celebrate Cow Appreciation day by getting a free meal at Chick-Fil-A. It's an hour away, and Joseph had a fever and our air conditioner leaked through the floor and dripped into the basement (stressful, but everything was fine. Even though Kevin was in Spain.).

Instead of going anywhere, we celebrated cows by making a cow out of a paper plate. Some water got spilled on it, so its eye disappeared, but it was still pretty cute.

I also enlisted the help of my Facebook friends to think of good cow puns, and I was not disappointed.

July 14th: We celebrated Bastille Day by looking at our Madeline book and making Lego buildings that loosely resembled the buildings in Paris and eating crepes with friends.

Eiffel Tower. Sort of.

July 20th: We celebrated Moon Landing day about a week early by going to the little moon exhibit in the Francois Xavier Bagnoud Building next the wave field. I'm still so amazed that real live humans stepped on the moon!

July 24th: We celebrated Pioneer Day by eating leftovers from the fridge because pioneers didn't have fridges. I tried to sing and play some pioneer songs from the Children's Songbook but neither kid was interested in them. Joseph and I finished reading The Boxcar Children which is sort of about pioneers in the 1940s. I pushed my kids around in a stroller which might have kind of been like a handcart. I sent my husband off to the modern equivalent of the Mormon Battalion (two back to back priesthood meetings he was gone for from 5 pm to 9:20 pm). I listened to a podcast from the Legacy series on Mormon Channel.

There are a few more holidays worth celebrating this month, so we'll see if we celebrate them or not. I'm tempted to hold out on celebrating Harry Potter's birthday until Joseph's old enough to really appreciate the books. And of course, we don't celebrate Christmas in July. I guess I did buy some things on Prime Day, but that's different.

A Superhero Birthday!

Joseph loves Superman and superheroes in general. (Except Buzz Lightyear. Hard to believe, but it's true . . . he has said multiple times that he's not cool anymore.) So it was pretty easy to pick a theme for his birthday party.

I've typically been someone who's shied away from elaborate birthday plans, at least in theory (though I had no track record of simple parties since this was the first I'd ever thrown). I knew all along that all Joseph wanted was a Superman cake and presents from his friends. But then as I started planning the games, food, and decorations I had a lot of fun, so it ended up being a little more elaborate than what I would have guessed a month ago. I was able to keep to my rule that I wasn't allowed to do anything that I didn't really want to do, which is why the kids didn't get any party favors (more on that later).

Anyway, here's what I did!

Decorations

While Kevin and Joseph were at a Father/Son campout, I pulled up "Once I was a Beehive" and watched it while making a Superman cityscape. Hooray for construction paper and glue sticks!

They also came in handy for some birthday banners.

And of course, the streamers from my birthday were still up. Because we never take decorations down as a rule.

We also had some of these again since Joseph remembered them from last year.

Food

I hadn't wanted to feed people lunch/snacks, but as I thought about it I decided it would be more fun than hard.

Isn't the Internet great?

(Most of these came from Google, but I did come up with the laser vision carrots by myself. Unsurprisingly, they were not a success.)

Cake

As promised, I made a Superman cake. Actually 2 of them.

Turns out . . . I threw two parties. We are just so blessed to have so many fun kids all born the exact same year as Joseph, plus a few more the year before or after, that I ended up inviting almost 20 kids (with all but 4 showing up). And that requires two parties. (And even then, there were a few more who I wanted but I would start panicking about the thought of more kids and have to tell myself no. There's a point where the difficulty in inviting more children stops being logarithmic and starts being exponential, to put it in math terms.)

So yeah. 2 cakes. And then I worried that there wouldn't be enough cake, especially if some parents stuck around, so we had some backup cupcakes too.

Inside each cake was a layer of yellow cake (with a tiny bit of rainbow added from food coloring I threw in) and a layer of chocolate cake.

Costumes

Joseph has wanted a cape ever since he watched Incredibles (which seems backwards, but whatever), and we've usually just tied a blanket around. But for his birthday I decided to make a real one.

To make it, I cut the sleeves and front off of a medium T-shirt, added velcro to the collar, and voila!

Sorry . . . this is the best picture I've taken of it so far

To make a mask, I traced two pieces of felt, cut them out, and sewed a piece of elastic in between. Simple, right?

In theory, yes. But after a little bit of trouble with my sewing machine I ended up only making 4 masks. There was just no point, I decided.

But hey! Traced pieces of felt make great party favors for the moms!

Games

One tricky part about having two parties is planning for different weather throughout the day. The day before, there was a 50% chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon . . . which meant I had to be prepared for anything! By the day of the party, I had a pretty good list of both indoor and outdoor games.

For Party 1, we started off with an obstacle course outside. They had to put on a cape and mask, jump from chalk circle to chalk circle to avoid hot lava, run on some zigzags, run through some trees, and then go through a tunnel made out of a cardboard box.

To be honest, it was a little bit of chaos. My friend described it as herding bumblebees. It was hard for them to wait in line, and when I added more chalk and more tunnels to make it go two at a time they just got more confused. But I think they still had fun.

We then had another relay race where the kids had to carry water from a bowl to some water bottles. The team that filled the water bottle first got to run over to the chalk fire and extinguish it. Again, the concept of racing seemed a little beyond them, as did waiting in line, so the kids who were interested kept at it and the kids who weren't found sticks and acorns to play with. No worries. When one of the water bottles was full (enough), we all took turns pouring the water on the chalk and ultimately grabbed the big bowl of water to douse it completely. By then it was 80 something degrees, sunny, and humid, so we were all glad to go back inside. I didn't think they would concentrate any more, so we just opened presents and had cake. And then it was time to be done!

Between the two parties, I cleaned a little, checked the guest list again, panicked when I realized I hadn't done a very good job of making sure other adults would be there, and read some Beezus and Ramona to psych myself up for the impending doom. (It turned out there were 2 adults there most of the time, and one of them took care of Matthew so I didn't have to. Phew!)

For Party 2 . . . well, it started a bit early since all but one of the kids were neighbor boys who play in our basement pretty often. (I have probably made it sound like they always hang out here all the time, but I think there's at least one house they frequent a lot more often, and 1-2 more that they play at a lot too. So it's a good system.) When 3:00 hit, they came upstairs for the party.

This time I started with an indoor game, even though the thunderstorm never materialized. I turned on some superhero theme songs and had them dance. When the music stopped, they all had to freeze except the designated superhero, who crawled through their legs to free them. He would pass the cape and mask on to the next kid, and we'd do another round. Some of them decided instead of dancing to find the other 3 masks that I'd made but hadn't found a use for, so before I knew it they were basically all superheroes rescuing each other and not doing very much dancing. No worries.

Then we went out and did the obstacle course.  In contrast to the first party, there was no difficulty getting them to do the course. Around and around and around they all went in a line of 7 boys. Across the chalk rocks! Along the zigzag! Through the tunnel! And again! I lost track of how many times they did it. After a few minutes they petered out and started to scatter. Time for the next activity!

The fire-extinguishing water bottle game went pretty well again, though it also seemed to go pretty fast. When I went inside I was shocked at how early it still was. Joseph opened presents lickety split, and it had barely been a half hour since the party started. Time for more games!

They didn't seem that interested in Hot Potato Kryponite (using a piece of crumpled up tin foil), so that lasted for maybe 3 minutes. Welp, I thought, time for cake and snacks. Once all of that was done, the party had only lasted an hour. There was still no sign of rain, so I said, "The rest of the party is a water party!" So they all ran back to their houses and put on their swim shorts and played with a hose for the rest of the afternoon. Really, that's probably what they wanted all along.

When all was said and done, we were left with basically two halves of the two cakes, nearly two dozen cupcakes, a lot of rice kryptonite treats, and a whole lot more presents than I was expecting since I put "no presents" on the invitation (edit: it only made it onto one invitation! Oops!). So, wins all around, right?

And Joseph was happy. So that's what matters most.

We sure like him.

Now three

Once upon a time, I had a baby. And three years after that baby was born, he turned three!!!

All of us have been excited about this birthday for months. I think Joseph told us every day starting when he was 2 1/2 that he was going to have a birthday and have another bus cake. He and I went to a few super cute birthday parties for his friends and it made me really want to plan a party for him. And, after several weeks of talking about it, he started to be excited about turning three (he spent a long time insisting that he was two and would be "forever").

As it turned out, it was sort of a low-key day. Because we went to Utah, I put off party planning until it was too late. (And to be honest, the idea of having a guest list stressed me out. Do you invite older and younger siblings? If you invite one kid, do you invite that kid's neighbors too? What sort of activities do you even do? Once I realized there were 17 children that I had to invite to not have my conscience searing me, my conscience relieved me of birthday duties altogether.) I had also flirted with the idea of having sprinklers and cupcakes for the neighbor kids, but the thunderstorm forecast (albeit incorrectly) made me decide against it. So, just decorations, presents, playing, and cake.

The night before was sort of hard because I had a lot of decorations I still wanted to put up and presents to wrap (ie cover with blankets), and all he wanted was for me to stay with him. 9:30, 10, 10:30, on and on and on. Kevin was at the store getting a few last-minute things, so he couldn't help.  I knew that what my son needed more than streamers was love and attention (in fact, I could almost hear President Uchtdorf's voice in my head telling me that) . . . but I knew that he would appreciate the streamers a lot more the next morning than a bit of love and attention. Thankfully, he finally went to sleep so we could finish getting ready for the day.

And then . . . it was his birthday! We had streamers dangling right outside his bedroom door, so when he left his room it was the first thing he saw. "Oh," he said in a tone of happy yet subdued surprise. Then he saw his stuffed animals waiting to wish him happy birthday on the stairs. "Oh," he said again in that chipper voice.

And then, there were presents! As in years past, we used a combination of wrapping paper and blankets to hide the presents. (And since this year he got a few presents that might have been less exciting [new sheets, new socks, and new underwear], we made sure to put those in the most exciting wrapping paper. For the record, he is still excited he got those for his birthday.)

As a side note, my life got so much easier when I realized balloons on the ground were just as good a decoration  as balloons on the wall.

After opening presents (thanks, by the way, to grandparents, aunts, and uncles for making sure he opened fun things too!), it was breakfast time. While Joseph was eating breakfast I decided to get started on the cake before it got too hot to use the oven. By this point I had decided to make a smallish chocolate cake from cake mix, use the remaining batter to make some chocolate cupcakes, and then some cupcakes from yellow cake mix. That way we could still share cupcakes with friends at a potluck the next day.

At first, things were going well. Made the chocolate cake and cupcakes. Got the cupcakes out of the muffin tin and put the yellow cake batter in. Made the yellow cupcakes. Got them out of the oven and then tried to get the cupcakes out of the muffin tin. But I had forgotten to regrease it so they came out crumbly. I planned on texting a few neighbors to come over and eat them (and maybe have a mini party while they were in here), but Joseph headed out the door right then, so I followed him out with the plate in tow. When we went out there was maybe one other kid, but when I stepped back in for a minute to dry my hair (I had taken a shower sometime in the midst of all the cooking), I watched as about ten kids came out of nowhere and swarmed the plate. It was amazing. And hey, I didn't want those cupcakes.

But the cupcake drama was not yet finished. Earlier, Joseph had been nibbling on chocolate cupcakes, so I put the plate on top of the fridge. But I forgot about it there until I opened the freezer, which knocked the plate off balance and sent most of the cupcakes to the floor. If Joseph hadn't cried, I might have.

Anyway, other than that, it was a great birthday! Just a nice, regular, low-key day. After Kevin came home, we ate pasta for dinner, and then it was time for cake!

So, on Joseph's birthday last year, I made this cake for him.

And, although he didn't appreciate it so much on his birthday, nearly every day since he's told me about it.  So, even though I suggested other cakes, he ended up getting one like this for his 3rd birthday:

Why is it that when I'm doing things like spelling words with sprinkles, I hear the phrase "good, better, best" playing through my head? Also, how many bus cakes do you have to make in a year before they actually start looking better each time?

After a fun evening eating cake and non-melted ice cream (thanks, new fridge!), Joseph went to bed. "Will it be my birthday tomorrow?" (Or the next day, or the next day, or the next day.)

No, but most of the decorations are still up.

Joseph with a birthday blower

We sure like him.

NERDFEST

It's that time of year again when we somehow find ourselves incredibly social and busy. I think something must happen when the snow starts to melt that makes us immediately start planning parties.

That, or it's just that there are a lot of things worth celebrating in the middle of March.

Either way, last week I stayed pretty busy planning parties, all of which ended up having a distinctive nerdy flair to them. The first one was Thursday night. I'm in this club where we teach each other useful skills every month or so. I signed up for it even though I didn't really know what I'd want to teach at first. I'm an okay cook, but I don't know any more about it than anyone else. I don't have any ultra special sewing or cleaning or budgeting skills. And I didn't really think I could teach anything about the piano in just an hour's time.

And so, I was left with teaching about basic electrical engineering concepts. And honestly, I loved it. I really hadn't done much with circuits since, well, taking the classes 5 years ago, and I had found other stuff more interesting because they involved more math. But I wanted this night to be mostly math-free, so I started with electrons and moved onto static electricity, basic circuits, rear defrosters, lightbulbs, toasters, capacitors, elevator switches, magnets, motors, waves, radio, and ended with ultrasound. The whole time I was talking I was just geeking out about how exciting it all was. "Guys. Get this. We just made some static on the radio using a coin and a 9-volt battery. Guys, you can see babies using electrical engineering!!!" I think they all liked it too. And it was nice to remember all these things and remember that I honestly truly loved so much of my major.

After the electronic snap kit was put away and the newly-ordered whiteboard was washed clean of all of its amplitude modulation explanations, that white board was filled with my to-do list for Friday's party!

Even now, if I try to explain what the party was about, I'm not really sure. "What are those planets on your wall for?" people ask and I give them a "oh, we were learning about planets!" explanation instead of, "Well, our friends wanted to do a Pi Day Party and they wanted to know if we should do a small party or large party and we decided that we should do both a small party and a large party only the small party should be extra extra nerdy and not make any sense and they decided to go along with it for reasons we're still not sure of."

So, that's basically what happened. I started playing around with a calculator and squared 3.13 (since the date was 3/13) and discovered that it was about 9.8 which is about the gravity constant for earth. So, naturally we needed to have a party dedicated to . . . gravity. (To be honest, this is not even the first gravity-themed thing I've planned.) But we didn't know if gravity was enough of a thing to celebrate on its own, so collectively we discovered that March 13th is also:

• Jewel Day
• Earmuff Day
• Open an Umbrella Indoors Day (I wonder if this one was related to it being Friday the 13th)
• Donald Duck's birthday  (according to some sources)
• National Sleep Day (this one made the Facebook trending sidebar so it must be real)
• Good Samaritan Day
• 234th anniversary of the discovery of Uranus

Now that we had these highly significant occasions to also celebrate, it was time to party!

When I wasn't cleaning or cooking, I spent a lot of the day making decorations. Kevin suggested planets as decorations, which was a little harder than I was expecting. Off the top of your head, can you really say what Venus looks like? Neither could I.

This one is earth. I could do that one okay. The quote says, "The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

This is Jupiter. Joseph helped. He also stuck a nearby quote upside down.  "You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care. "

At 6, we had cheesy potatoes (a food that utilizes gravity a fair amount), beans, salad, and apples (think Isaac Newton) for dinner. We then did some gravity games such as a paper airplane contest (timed with a homemade pendulum that somehow used the number 3.13), tower-building,and Jenga (which got knocked down immediately by a toddler).

Objective: create a tower that could hold a 9-volt battery. Success. I spent a lot of time nodding at my teammate's ideas, which probably helped.

We decided to forgo the relay race that would have used jewels, earmuffs, sleepwear, and umbrellas to celebrate those other holidays. It was muddy and snowy outside, and we don't have earmuffs. But we did do the hitting game again (what a name) with Disney characters, where someone stands in the middle of a circle and tries to hit the person assigned the Disney character's name before they say another name. For dessert we had pie and square root brownies. Also, I think I got exactly one comment about the planets and none about the birthday cake on Uranus, so that was probably not the best use of time. Live and learn.

The final leg of our nerdfest journey began on Saturday. We went to a birthday party (not nerdy), Kevin's lab party, and then the larger Pi Day party. At the work party, I tested out my theory that engineers don't get into pi by asking how many digits they all had memorized.

"Um, 4?" "5?" "3?" "Why would you memorize that?" I felt validated.

After the work party, we headed over to the church for the Pi Day party of the century! If there ever was a year to celebrate it, this was definitely the year. There were decorations all throughout related to pi -- trivia, banners, Pi sudoku, and other things I can't remember. There were trivia contests and pie eating contests. And lots of pie. I was proud to have my name attached to the party, even though we hadn't done anything besides say, "Yeah, this sounds like a good idea."

After it was all cleaned up and Joseph had forgiven Kevin for eating pie with just his mouth instead of with a spoon, our nerdfest was done.

Moment caught.

I'm sure we'll find more to celebrate next March.