A birthday Friday with fun and family

Friday July 25th was Lea's actual birthday and I wanted to do something special. So where did we take her? The doctor, despite my own good advice to other mothers of not taking your kid for their check up on the actual birthday because shots on such a day are just not right. But I asked when I made the appointment if she would receive shots. I was told no. They lied. But overall it went ok. We read books, learned what an otoscope is (thanks to a pooh bear book) and were told that she is perfectly fine, but perhaps not getting enough calcium so eat cheese, yogurt and don't drink whole milk. Then the fun started.

I wanted to go somewhere for lunch where Lea would have fun, but Mommy choked a bit on the thought of going to Chuck E Cheese (especially because Lea ate pizza the night before, sure we'll use that excuse). So the next best thing? Chuck E Cheese for grown ups. We took Grandma to lunch at Dave and Busters. Lea had a blast. We got in a booth and wanted to order and Lea was actually bouncing in her seat saying "please can we go play, please, please please, can we go, can we go, please?" So we went and played. The biggest hit with Lea was a horse race game where the little horses moved on the track as you rolled a ball in one of 6 holes (walk, trot or run would move him one to 4 spaces). It was great when we played against each other because one of us one tickets, but when other people sat down, there was not chance of tickets so we moved on to ski ball and race car driving. Lea did not like the race car that moved as we dove and bumped as we ran over things. We ended up with an expensive, but good lunch and enough tickets to get a little car that rides on a puzzle track AND a Tinkerbell coloring puzzle. She also got a pink fluffy pen just because it was her birthday. She had a blast and didn't want to leave. The lights, the sounds, enticing to those of us who are not 3. But home we went for a much needed nap.

After nap there was some cake creating, cake messing up, crying over broken cake, cake salvage but that is a previous post. We're not dwelling on that are we? tee hee.

After we got the cake situated, Grandpa Dan joined us and Grandma Lynn for dinner. Daddy made a beautiful grilled pork roast on the grill with a cedar plank and orange glaze. YUM!

Now Mommy couldn't sleeps so when Lea woke up at 5:45 Mommy was already up and ready to go. We played and made paper hats for our little evening party. Everyone was thrilled to have paper hats to wear (ha!).

We found that opening the wonderful gifts that Mommy, Daddy, Grandma & Grandpa shower upon Lea at the birthday party is more than little attention spans can handle so we've instituted the Family Birthday the night before the party. It seems to be a great tradition that I hope to continue for... well, for forever! It allows us to spend some real quality time with the Grandfolks where as at the chaos of the party we do not really get to spend quality time with anyone and Lea's attentions are greatly diverted. Lea is also able to enjoy her presents more if she can play with them a bit as soon as she opens them.
Lea opens a card from Grandpa filled with change to put in her blue cow (Babe the Blue Ox) bank.


Lea gets paint from Grandpa


One thing Lea has asked for almost all year is a pair of red handled scissors. One of Dan's customers let Lea use scissors while Dan was working and ever since it has been a frequent request and learning the chant of "I'm not old enough for scissors." Well 3 seemed to be old enough for safety scissors so Lea now has scissors. She tried to open her gifts with them. It was very cute she toted them around and wouldn't let them out of her sight (at least until a bigger cooler present was opened). But she was responsible, in a video below you will see her stop what she is doing and put her scissors on the table. What a good girl!
Using scissors

Lea attempts to open presents with her new red handled scissors

Lea opens presents with her new red handled scissors

Mommy set her own cursed fate (and Daddy's as well) by buying Lea a key board. (Note to Kris in reference to when I bought drums for Wilder — payback is, as they say a bitch and I did it to myself!). While Lea has a slight musical inclination it is most just a jumble of keys and tempos from wild button pushing. I've got a kids book from the library on how to play so we'll see if she's a natural and picks anything up from the simple books. 

And behold, a microphone too. But will Lea sing? No, she just plays like the Captain to my Tennille. She constantly wants Daddy and Mommy to sing her a song. Grandpa put together a pretty good lounge act as seen in the following video play list.



Opening the keyboard

Playing the keyboard


Lea got so many super presents. She is well spoiled by her grandparents (and parents? maybe a little.) We all had fun playing with Lea's presents. And the game ended in a rousing game of Candyland. Lea got two games, Candyland and Hungry Hungry Hippos for her birthday. She has the attention span for about half of a game, but we can get through a whole game. She's very good at taking turns. We'd tried out playing Yahtzee with her one rainy Saturday and she did well with turns, but it didn't quite hold her interest like gumdrop mountains and the chocolate swamp. 

Now Hungry Hungry Hippos is a different story. To Lea the HIppos are not a game, but an opportunity to control these Hippo's snack time. Lea renamed one of them Zaboo (from Zaboomafoo on PBS). We played last night (July 31) and I learned that Lea is very controlling. My poor Hippo (Not Zaboo the orange HIppo) could eat no snacks. Mommy could not flip the balls into play or as Lea says "snacks." The poor Hippos just sat there looking at the snacks. I tried to explain that the box says they are "hungry, HUNGRY Hippos." The Hippos want to eat, let the poor Hippos eat their snacks. No, Lea said. So we sat there with a stalemate, Hippos remained Hungry, Mommy with nothing to do. Then I shook the whole board up and started smacking my Hippo around and she got some snacks. That got Lea into the spirit of the game and things were better. Poor underfed HIppos.

But candyland as a last game of Birthday was a fun idea. Grandma and Grandpa played and Daddy helped keep things going. It moved along swiftly and Lea got the jist of it right away. Keeping track of who her man was ended up being the most challenging aspect... that and remaining focused. But it was a lot of fun. 

We ended the night with Grandpa's culinary invention the cupcookie. Pre-made cookie dough in a muffin tin makes a cupcookie. They are great and soft (unless mommy over cooks them!). So a cupcookie with a candle, some schlopp schlopp ice cream and whipped cream and turning 3 was complete. At least for a day. For tomorrow we party with the 3 year old set.

The cake fiasco

Now I know that the birthday event was not about me, but I have a story to tell. The truth about the cake needs to be told. I'll get it out of the way so we can focus on Birthday posting.

Dan had early on suggested we just make a box cake mix. It would be easy, we could make is square and it might even look like a circus tent if you cut it right. Simple. Well, then I got involved. Once I started talking about fondant Dan washed his hands of the whole process (at least until he had to shove them elbows deep into frosting and be my knight in white frosting and totally save our cake!) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A co-worker who shall remain nameless, Amy, is an enabler. (Sure, sure, you're saying its easy to blame as many people as I want in hindsight, but we all know Mommy overdrive is responsible.) Amy (in a truly kind and gracious gesture) handed off some baking implements from a cake class she'd taken. She enjoyed it, had succeeded in some cake decorating and had no desire to pursue it, so would I, being the creative genius that I am, like to give it a try, its fun. Well it came with a book and ideas that all looked so easy. (Well, they didn't all look easy. The cupcakes with individual animal heads sculpted out of fondant that my mom kept oohing and ahhing at did not look easy, so I could have made it more difficult for my self I guess.)

So I thought I'd give it a shot. I even practiced, but we know where that led with the bowling cake. It turned out fine so long as it was served to people who love me. I thought I'd learned my lesson, I had not. In my defense I didn't even try to make my own fondant like I did the first time. I was simplifying.

We baked the cakes early, let them cool, even froze them a bit so they would be easy to work with. And when you play with fondant, you don't really have to frost pretty. So we didn't.

The beginning of the downfall.


The challenge was the point on the top of the tent. I had some engineering ideas. The short story is that they all involved cutting the 4th cake into triangles. The even shorter story is none of them worked. They didn't stay and as they fell off the top, they took half the cake with it. So here we were with a cake that wouldn't stay together, fondant cut and starting to harden that I couldn't get to hold the cake in anyway.
Fondant strips removed once from the cake as it fell apart the first go round.


Dan to the rescue holding the cake together.


I was literally in a ball on the kitchen floor beginning to cry when my knight in white frosting showed up, used his strong hand to whip that cake into shape and patched it together with the already cut fondant.

The patchwork cake


It worked. It just needed to be prettied up. So on the morning of the party, did I prepare as I should have for the arrival of 10 munchkins? No, I went across the Metroplex in search of primary color fondant. The first place I'd bought it was out of stock, so I drove to Rockwall. If I'd used my noodle I would have realized that more than one chain of stores must sell the stuff, but I was on a mission, so to Rockwall I went. Fondant retrieved, some lessons learned, the second layer of stripes went on well and the cake turned out well enough to receive compliments at the party. I tried not to tell the story to everyone who walked in the door, but several got this long winded version of the cake fiasco and Dan as my savior in all things pastry.

The saved cake.


Lea didn't know the difference and didn't really care. It was cake no matter what it looked like.


In the throws of my breakdown I told Dan and my mom to stop me if I ever spoke of baking our own cake again. As we fell asleep that night, I said "if I ever do it again, I'll know to put a base layer of fondant on before anything else." Dan just sighed and rolled over.

Pre-Birthday going-ons

Once the fireworks ended, July became one big lead into Lea's big 3rd birthday. Well... even before, because invitations went out right before the 4th. Lea was instrumental in producing the invitations. She has the very important job of gluing the elephant puppets on popsicle sticks. And not in the usual, "look what Lea can do and that I half did." No, no, no. This time it was all Lea with a paint brush and a plate of glue who did all the elephants. I have proof...




making elephants


The weekend before Lea's birthday we headed out to Grandma's for a fun weekend. Lea got a few early presents. Grandma got Lea a marble race game like we played with in California at Grandma JoAnn's. We played with that all weekend. Again I don't know who enjoyed it more Mommy or Lea. You can tell mommy loved it because there are no pictures and occasionally the amount of photos taken is inversely proportional to the amount of fun mommy is having because she forgets about the camera. I just can't get to the camera.

But that was not Lea's only present. Mommy also gave Lea roller skates. Because really, now that she's got that whole walking down she needed a challenge. Lea enjoyed the pre-school skates and Grandma's was a good place to try them out because of the long driveway. Like all kids (and adults) learning to skate she mostly just walked barely rolling the wheels. There was one pretty good fall and her bottom took the worst of it, but after a few tears (mostly of the crocodile variety, I believe) she got right back up and gave it another go... then asked if she could skate in the grass. Well for grass skating, Grandma's is the best place. Lea trudged across the back 40 (feet) and fed Mary the Donkey an apple. Mary was more frightented than usual by a toddler in elbow pads and a helmet... Like this kid is coming at me and means bussiness, just leave the carrot alien girl and walk away.
Lea on skates

skating with Mommy

skating with Grandma



The week before Lea's birthday we gave Lea a present I've been holding on to for more than a month. Hand made finger puppets from Grandma JoAnn. Lea loved them and we acted out a circus book and went through everything the animals eat. I need to make little popsicle stick puppets with peanuts and bananas for the circus animals to eat!
Lea's new menagerie

Giraffe puppet

That's using your noodle

In a feat of master engineering and ingenuity Dan and I saved our back yard pool in time for a big helping of monkey soup at Lea's birthday party (but much more on that in a later post).

One weekend about 2 weeks back we noticed that the ring that holds air to keep the top of the pool up was needing to be inflated more than usual. Dan has always contended that we had a leak and I said it was just air gets hot and cools and it needs to be inflated sometimes. Well I think I was wrong all along, despite my protests to Dan that I'm always right.

I looked out one afternoon and the entire ring was flat as a pancake on an amoeba shaped pool that was thankfully still holding water. God love physics! The pool with the deflated ring held water for 2 days while we fashioned our solution. We discussed many options, including that can foam stuff that seals and insulates and expands once you spray it. However, Dan pointed out we would not be able to put it away for the winter any more because we would have permanent 14' ring. So I came up with shoving noodles in the ring.

Dan bought 40 noodles at the dollar store (he had to go to 2 to get all the noodles... we bought the town out of noodles!). He cut slits in the ring and created a 9 noodle diameter ring that has held up for weeks and throughout monkey soup!

Is there such a thing as too much Scooby Doo?

So I came home one day last week after work to find the following.

The only information I had was Dan quickly added, "We watched a lot of Scooby Doo today." I thought she was saying "Mad Mommy" and I argued, I wasn't mad... well this is the mad MUMMY... Adorable! Dan and Lea have so much fun together.

4th & 5th of July Festivities, Events and Emergencies

Anarchy on the 4th... well 5th if only we'd known... But that's the end of this story, the beginning is a fantastic 4th of July. It was of course my mom's birthday so we started on Thursday with a nice dinner (just me and mom... a rarity without Lea, but good for the grown ups to re-connect) at Simply Fondue. Then Friday we spent all day together, grilling burgers in the back yard for lunch and an afternoon getting ready for Fireworks.
Teddy and Michael came over in the afternoon and around 6 we headed out. Grandma and I took Lea to the playground for some pre-firework energy burn. It worked well. There was a big family reunion at the Stone Tables park by White Rock, so Lea had plenty of playmates. Most older and not quite right, but when Lea found her playmate, they were a good match.

We had a wonderful picnic on the parking garage at work with peach sangria and yummy light food. Lea spent much of her time blowing bubble with Becky and Mandy who joined us. The fireworks were great. Lea was tired by the time they went off. We brought blankey with us and she covered her eyes for half of the display. When I realized she was hiding, I covered her ears and then it seemed ok to watch. She said later that she like the twirly ones. I think those are my favorites too.

Then Saturday was "Wilder's Pool Party." That's what Lea called it. Lea swam from 2pm til 8pm I think. She had a ball running around playing with everyone and swimming with her little floaties.
Lea in her floaties

Wilder and Lea share a bucket of water and toys. It took Wilder a bit to be convinced to wear his floaties, but then he was swimming like a fish. He followed Lea around calling her name, it was adorable. She's got quite a fan. Its mutual too. She still (weeks later) wants to go to "Wilder's Pool Party" like its a weekly occurrence.


It was a really great party until about 5pm, and even then while stressful things happened (I promise I'll get to them) we still had a very nice time. Kris and Jerry threw an excellent party. The best part for Dan and me was we knew almost everyone there without the stress of hosting and ensuring I talked to everyone.  
Here are Rus, Dan and Becky, kicking back.

Lea with the ladies from work (Susie, Prio and Judy)

Old man Hopens. Sadly he didn't wear his speedo as promised!

 

General party chaos. Just lots of people having a good time.

And here is Wilder while he was still having fun... then like I said at 5pm it all kind of took a turn.

Kris came to me and said they were taking Wilder to the Emergency room because he had been in a bad mood, then sleepy and then was not able to stay conscious. We had all read an email article about dry drowning and those were the exact symptoms so the panic was real. It turned out to not be that, but the ER docs agreed those were the symptoms and if kids exhibit those symptoms they should always be brought to the ER. You can't err on the side of caution. 

It seemed to be a case of dehydration, though the two hospitals they visited never gave a diagnosis. There was much supposition among those who stayed after they went to the hospital and dehydration was the favorite diagnosis. Kris said after they had been there a while, suddenly Wilder was himself again, so I can only assume it was once the IV fluids got into him, but I'm no doctor. They did every kind of test from cat scan to testing for diabetes and he got a clean bill of health when they let him go home. Doctors Hospital sent him to Childrens and at 6 am Wilder and Papa (Jerry) came home.

I guess I left out why people were staying even after the parents rushed to the hospital. Well, we stayed with baby Hunter so that stress was not on Kris. Ann, Abel, Mia, and Leo stayed until about 7 or so. Abel being the baby whisper was a huge help, as was Ann who gave baby support and helped Dan and Becky clean up (their dog also tore a toe nail and bled all over the carpet — when it rains it pours). Michael stayed to entertain Becky and me until 11 or so. Becky and I stayed until about 2 am when Kris came home assuming Jerry and Wilder would be close behind. The ended up staying until 6 am or so, like I said, but Kris needed sleep and to breast feed. So it all worked out and made one hell of a party. I guess they say its not a party until someone goes to the ER, but I think that's supposed to change after you hit 30. It does speak well of Kris & Jerry's party that we had an awesome time, even though they ended up in the hospital. Of course we can only say that because Wilder turned out to be fine and we're all very thankful for that.

At Grandma's for the weekend

This is Lea in Grandma's driveway with her new blow up fishing pole. A little in the spirit of Andy Griffith, don't you think.

We had a nice weekend back in June. Grandma got a super paddling pool with a palm tree that sprays water and a slide with a second mini pool that is twice as deep. Its like a baby hot tub, but not hot. In fact that day, despite the blazing summer temps, the water was a bit cold. We had rain overnight so I guess that cooled every thing off.

Grampy and Margarete brought Grandma a spray cow for the yard from Arkansas (Just what she always wanted, tee hee). It is actually very cute and Lea had fun splashing in it.

And of course we can't seem to go anywhere without putting daddy to work. Here
Dan is checking under the house for the mystery smell. We never found the smell, but Dan found some cobwebs.