Around Here - Almost Spring!

I've been trying to think of a better lead in to this blog post than something cliche like "I can't believe how fast time is speeding by" or "It's the middle of March ALREADY?!"  But I couldn't because the fact is, the days really have been going by too quickly for me and often by dinner time I'm left with a partially unfinished To Do List and not enough energy or time to do anything other than hope there is something decent on the DVR so I don't get stuck watching some strange documentary my husband runs across on the History Channel.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not overwhelmed or stressed right now.  I'm on top of all my Have Tos for the house, the kids, the Etsy shop, finally getting a handle on an exercise routine and getting more active, and even working in time with friends, fun things with the family, and even a few things from my When I Get a Chance list.  Still, there always seems to be things I don't quite get to for days at a time - like blogging!  So I thought I would do a quick Around Here post, if only to get myself back into the blogging groove. 

This is what my craft table looked like this morning - remnants of last night's Card (making) Group and today's crop of countdown blocks getting ready to ship out.  

And have I mentioned I finally joined Instagram?!  

It must be "baby season" again because I've had a pretty big bump in sales for the pregnancy countdown blocks in the past few weeks and quite a few friends and acquaintenances have announced pregnancies in recent months too.  It was my turn to host our monthly card making group so, of course, I chose baby cards for the theme.

Can you guess which one was mine?  Yup, the one with the baby feet ;)

Speaking of babies - it's baby season out on the ranch too.  We have a handful of new calves born the last few weeks, including this little guy.

He was born in the middle of the night during a really cold snap and my Dad was concerned that he wasn't eating.  I was the only one around to help out first thing and "got" to spend the better part of my morning playing cowgirl as we attempted to get the baby and his mom in from the back pasture and into the small corral near one of the closer sheds.  It was quite a process and in the end we had to bring almost the entire herd into the corral then take them all back out to the pasture again.

On the up side, while it was may have been cold it has been absolutely gorgeous outside.

On the Mom Front - the kiddos are keeping busy with school and activities.  Miss Kate is doing great on the swim team and knocked quite a few seconds off a couple of her best times at the meet last weekend. 

Tyler's class was required to participate in the school's creative challenge (the theme being "Behind my Reflection is so Much More, Talents and Skills for me to Explore) and he chose to do a photo project in which he used mirrors to take selfies doing things he enjoys or is good at.  We got that turned in just in time for him to start working on a "storytelling" presentation that must be 3-7 minutes long and include expression, guestures, and props.
Kaitlyn also had a big book report due, in which she had to turn the book into a breakfast cereal then create a TV-style commercial for it.  We all spent a funny evening as cast and crew recording said commercial.  I was dreading it, but as it turned out I haven't laughed that hard in weeks.  Seriously though teachers, can the parents get a little break here?

As I said, the weather has been gorgeous with very few storms and the a-typical practically snow-less winter has continued.  I was nervous that we wouldn't get a chance to use the groupon for tubing that I got the kids for Christmas but we managed to slip in on one of the colder week nights shortly before they closed down (early) for the season.  The only snow in sight was what they had manufactured for the tubing and cross country runs.  Crazy weather.  The tubing itself was tons of fun.  We also managed some time at the ice skating rink with cousins, which was pretty much the last of the activities left on our (imaginary) Winter Bucket List.

My husband got both of us fancy new pedometer thingy's and we've been trying to make being active a priority.  That has involved a lot of walks outside - with the dog on the ranch, or loading up the kids and their bikes/rollerblades and getting to know the local walking paths.  The second option was prompted in part the day the dog came home all muddy and full of burrs from our walk in the field, and from the fact that no longer living in a neighborhood means the kids can't just step out the door and have somewhere to ride their bikes.  Everything else makes up for that little issue though, and we are very happy to be living "back home."

And that, my dears, is part of what has kept me away from the blog lately.  That and the multitude of things that needing fixing - the computer spent a week being repaired, the brand new fridge finally arrived but conked out within days of it's arrival, and so on.  But I'm trying not to dwell on the annoying parts and enjoying the fact that for today I have found some free time to do some "catching up"  And maybe, just maybe after I grab some lunch I might be able to do some scrapbooking before the kids get home from school.  Ya think?!

Minecraft Birthday Party

Look who turned 8 last week!  He was SO excited - and who can blame him?  Birthdays are exciting, especially when you are looking forward to a party with a bunch of your new friends and one with the theme of your favorite game to boot.  Yup - Tyler, like many kids right now, is completely obsessed with Minecraft.

I have to admit I know very, very little about Minecraft, nor was I really in the mood to sit down and play the game with the kids.  So I relied pretty heavily on looking at ideas online with one of the kids at my side making comments.  It was kind of a fun process actually.  Tyler had lots and lots and lots of ideas. ;)  And Kaitlyn is great about helping me pull it all together.  In the end, we decided on the following:

Creeper Rice Krispie Treats went to school with Tyler for all of his classmates.  We just tinted the marshmallow green and the eyes are chocolate chips which I melted and piped onto wax paper to form the eyes and mouth.

Once the birthday boy was off to school I got to work on the cake.  He had requested a TNT cake, which seemed as easy as stacking a few cake squares on top of each other and covering it with red.  Uh huh.  Yeah.  First ever epic cake fail.  It started leaning after I got all the layers on and even with additional support, it had toppled before I could get the exterior frosting on it.

I had to laugh.  Really, what can you do but laugh?  And my brother, who was eating breakfast at the time, laughed at me too - and asked if he could "publicly humiliate" me by posting a photo on Facebook.  I told him that was fine, because I fully intended to blog about it ;)

So what do you do when your cake falls apart and you don't want to run to the store?  I turned it into Dirt Cake, that's what.  

The kids didn't have a clue - ha!  In fact, they loved it.  Couldn't get enough of the cake in the cups with the Minecraft toppers I printed at the last minute (found here).

 The rest of the food was pretty easy.  Tyler had been pretty quick to suggest a bunch of foods that were in the game:  "bread" was sandwiches cut into squares, "potion of healing" were just Hugs with labels on them (I was informed that the potions are always red but since it would have taken way too many boxes to find enough red drinks for everyone we used green too since Creepers are his favorite character from the game), "slime balls" were green grapes, "raw fish" were goldfish crackers, and carrots and gold apples were, well, carrots and apples ;)

 Printables for the food and drink lables came from here, though I did resize and edit them a bit, as well as use them for the base to make the other signs for the party.

I found the printable for the large Steve and the Creeper here.

The table set up was pretty simple (and inexpensive) too.  It doesn't take a lot to make a big statement.

 The plates were just green plates with Creeper faces that I had cut out of vinyl with the Silhouette machine.

And the table runner was green wrapping paper that I quickly cut into block-type forms on the edges.  I used the Silhouette to cut a pattern for the Creeper face out of cardstock and used it and a Sharpie to make Creeper faces on the table runner and on a bunch of green balloons.

 The balloons went downstairs in the "party area," along with my standard bead board birthday banner.  I also put a set a balloons out by the road and by the door, along with a Minecraft Welcome sign.  I always try to do something like that in case a guest hasn't visited our house before so they can easily tell where the party is.

 As I mentioned in an earlier post, Tyler had invited his entire class to his party and not knowing how many kids would actually show up, planning was a little tricky.  I decided to use the kitchen/living room for the food and do all the activities in the family room downstairs.  I only set up one table, which was perfect for the amount of kids that did RSVP but I had another table and extra decorations on stand-by in case we had any show up unannounced.  We only ended up with one that hadn't called ahead, so it was fine.
Anyway.  One of Tyler's first requests was to have "torches" as decoration so I printed off a few for the stairs/hallway and used crepe paper to form the "portal" (or am I confused and they only use that term in Skylanders??)

Downstairs, I had turned my craft tables into "crafting tables" (of course!).  It was just a simple matter of using electrical tape and a ruler to form the grid.  Minecraft is all about building, so I had a few crafty projects planned.

 And again, not knowing how many kids would actually attend the party, I had planned accordingly.  If we had a large number of guests, I had extra helpers on hand so we could split them up into smaller groups and do "stations" for the different crafts and games.  I put all the things needed for each activity in its own little basket so we could just grab them as needed.

 As it turned out, we had about 10 kids attend so they just did everything in one big group, but I was still glad I had planned ahead and set it up this way.

 I always like to have some sort of low key activity for everyone to start working on when they arrive.  This keeps the fidgeting and chaos to a minimum while still allowing time for any later guests to arrive without missing much of the planned activities.  For the Minecraft party, our Arrival Activity was making Minecraft masks.  I cut out a bunch of small squares out of colored paper and the kids glued them onto poster board that I had cut into squares with a couple of square openings for eyes.

This worked pretty well, but these kids were HYPER that night so as soon as we could, we moved on to the more active games.

This game was originally intended to be a beanbag toss, but the beanbags we have for our cornhole boards were too big for holes so we used Neft guns instead.  Nerf dart look close enough to the TNT in the game, right?  The kids didn't care - they had fun (though some of them were way too excited to wait their turns!).

The next game was probably the favorite for our rowdy crew.  I had filled a bunch of balloons and put a line of tape down the center of the room to split it into two parts.  Yes, I was all creative and used some of the Creeper balloons as well as some smaller colored ones which could represent the other animals in the game - but I don't think the kids noticed or cared.  The point of the game was to get all the balloons onto the other team's side.  We played music while they bopped balloons back and forth (had intended to find Minecraft parody songs but forgot to get them cued up and just ended up using whatever was on the IPOD) until the music stopped, then everyone would freeze while we counted the balloons on each side.  As I said - this game was a perfect way for them to use up their energy without hurting anything so we let them do 5 or 6 rounds before we headed upstairs for cake and gifts.

The time just flew by and by the time everyone had finished eating and all the gifts were unwrapped we only had a few minutes left before parents would start arriving so I gave them some block character printables to assemble.

This link has a lot of great printables for all of the blocks, characters, etc.

As I said, the time went by so quickly we didn't end up using some of the activities I had planned.  Like:

Minecraft character Perler bead keychains.  This activity alone probably would have taken them half an hour.

 And the bean bags were going to be repurposed to "Feed the Wolf."

But I'd rather have too many activities planned than have bored kids at the end of a party.

As they were working on the character printables, I also had them take turns assembling their own favor bags.

For the favor bag tags I used a pdf file I found online (see this blog), added the rest of the message (in Photoshop) then printed them 6 to a page.  

 The tags went inside a cellophane bag and the kids got to fill it with:

Creeper face lollipops, (had an a-ha moment on this one and instead of cutting them all out by hand I figured out how to make my own pattern for the Silhouette to cut out - go me!)

 glow stick "torches"

licorice "TNT" (Tyler was very pleased with those.  When he saw them all assembled he told me "Mom, you've really outdone yourself!") and Hershey Kiss "emeralds, red stones, and silver"

So there you have it!  Paper, scissors, a printer, and a lot of ink - that's really all it takes to make a little guy happy on his birthday ;)



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It's almost party time - again

Tyler's birthday - it crept up on me.  Usually I have these things planned out weeks in advance.  In fact, often I do most of the planning and prep for his party before Kaitlyn's birthday because I've found I get Party Burnout after hers and I have a hard time motivating myself to put much energy and effort into it.  With the move happening so quickly after Miss Kate's birthday this year I didn't put any thought into Tyler's, other than asking what theme he wanted and randomly adding ideas to my Pinterest board if I ran across them.  So last week it hit me - we are getting really close to the holidays and thus really close to Tyler's birthday!  I'd better start planning!

The kids start school at different times now and Tyler and I tend to have a good 30 minutes of down time between when he is ready and when we have to go out to the bus so it was fairly easy to find the time to sit down with him and start going through ideas to see what struck his fancy.  And man is that kid full of ideas!  It was completely adorable to hear him ramble on and on about what we could do at his party.  Care to guess what theme he chose that had him so excited?

Tyler also wanted to invite his entire class to the party and usually I would say no to that many kids at once.  But we haven't been here long enough for him to have formed many close friendships yet and a party would be a great Get To Know You thing for him.  And since it's right in the middle of the holiday season and on a Friday night, a lot of people may already have plans.  So I said yes to the possible probable chaos and 25 of these invitations went out last week.

Knowing I was going to need a bunch of them I found a good pdf for the base of the invite online then added party details and printed them out 4 to a page.  The fonts are Minecrafter and ProFontWindows.

If you are looking for more Minecraft party ideas I have quite a few on my Pinterst Board (here).  And, of course, I will tell you all about it after the party - stay tuned!  Less than two weeks to go until party time...

Tyler's Monogram Wall

I finished it!!  Tyler's Monogram wall, which has been in the works since I did Kaitlyn's wall shortly after we moved in (3 years ago!), is finally DONE!

This is what his room looked like yesterday morning:

 And after the husband so nicely helped me hang everything up (without one swear word! A couple of eye rolls, yes, but no swear words lol  I point this out only because he had just spent some time wresting with hanging other photos in our bedroom and they weren't exactly cooperative.  I might be banned from buying frames with that type of hanger ever again.):

I'm so excited to have this one on the wall.  I put it together a couple of years ago and Tyler was not happy when he found out I had glued the cars on there and he could never have them back.  Didn't matter that he never played with those particular cars ;)  I'm pretty happy with the overall car theme for the room - kind of subtle so it doesn't scream CARS and not too toddler-esque so hopefully it will last him a few years.  But with enough bits here and there to be fun and personalized.  Look! I even managed to match the colors of the bedspread with most of the photos (that wasn't exactly intentional lol).

When we showed Tyler the finished wall last night he looked at it for a minute with no expression then as he started looking closely at it he got pretty excited.  I'm very happy with it and also very happy to cross another project off the list that has been on there for so long.  I'm feeling very productive lately.  You'll see what I mean as soon as I get the chance to work on a few more blog posts (and a few of the bigger things I am realizing I never got posted - like Tyler's birthday party from December!).  For now, one last look at the wall while I breath a sigh of relief to have it not only finished, but shared with everyone in Blogland (or at least the few friends that I know of that consistently read my blog).

Linking to:
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Kelly's Korner