Bionicles vs. Bakugan

That was the theme the Things picked. A few weeks ago we had a birthday party for the things. We sent out invitations. Then realized we might need to get ready! 5 day whirlwind. The whole time it was raining and snowing, forecasted to last a week more and all we had planned were pinatas. If everyone invited came, there would be 40 kids! Inside! In my messy uninhabitable house! And my husband had to work from sunrise to sunset that whole weekend! I was freaking out. Me, no adults, 40 kids, hazardous house. Snow and rain. Nice, just nice. A very wonderful friend I owe forever helped box up a bunch of stuff downstairs and clean my kitchen so there would be no hazards. Luckily, by halfway through the party, the skies were clear and we did the pinatas and played outside! We also had some balloon brawls and a scavenger hunt to find missing Bionicle pieces and Bakugan. The boys wanted a cake with ice cream sandwiches on it. I covered the sides in chocolate whipped cream because one wanted chocolate frosting. It was runny. Not an elegant cake, but it was so yummy Carino asked for one just like it for his birthday. Here's some of the fun:

Then when Thing 2 comes up to bat, I see in some moment he changed clothes. Adorable outfit, wouldn't you say???


Here's the messy yummy cake:

And the boys after the party with their loot:

The next day, we caught the goats under the pinata shell, one on each side, staring up at it, and obviously wishing it were lower so they could get at it. I ran for my camera but was too late for that shot, but got Buckley (the goat, not the fiance) jumping to try to reach it. They are silly. And I don't have a fiance, my niece Anna does, so now we got two Buckleys in the family in less than a week. What are the odds of that???


Hopefully I will catch you up on our other great adventures soon. Till then, take care, all!

The Things Turn 7

Last Friday we had a party for the Things. It was a lot of fun, but it took me forever to come up with what I wanted to do for the party. There are really no ideas for a Transformers vs. Bionicles party on birthdaypartyideas.com. Can you imagine that? It took a long while to get the creative juices in gear and have a plan. Then I had to get the supplies and get everything ready at the last minute. There are Transformers favors and such, but since the Bionicles movie is not close to release yet, there was NOTHING on that front. It was a stressful 5 days or so. I vowed not to do any parties after this year several times. I threatened to cancel it anytime I didn't get due submission from the natives. I had to give up on my cool idea to make Bionicle swords for everyone because there is no instrument known to man or at least to my house that will cut foam board with any precision. It would have been so cool. It's just as well because making 20 of them would have meant NO sleep the night before. Enigma made the invites, thus locking in my commitment, and she spray painted 2 square boxes to make 2 Allspark pinatas- one for each boy. My mom thought good thoughts for me the day before the party, because I didn't even have things ready enough to get her to help with anything before her bedtime that day, I think. It's a good thing she thought good thoughts because as it was, everyone was a wreck. I went straight from a cousin's funeral to pick up the boys from school and within the hour they'd all had a complete meltdown. One was an emotional wreck all day, finishing off the evening by threatening another brother with a scout pocketknife, then curling up in a ball in an empty dresser. (He's not supposed to have the pocketknife at all, by the way. Anyone need a pocket knife? And yes, I'm concerned about this behavior.)

The day of the party dawned with everyone in a better mood and me almost ready for the party. Then as I got ready after working all morning, Papi shows up with new sofas. Luckily I was there to approve or disapprove because the last time he suddenly brought in used sofas, he almost got kicked out of the house over it. This time he was careful and asked first before unloading them and carting away my old sofas. He made a trade for them with an apartment complex who needed some work done. They are converting from Singles/furnished to Married/unfurnished. They are nice sofas, and now we have 4 matching sofas, 2 upstairs, 2 downstairs.
Wanna see them? This is upstairs This is downstairs:
Umm, not sure why the colors don't look the same, they are more like a sage green in person.
The old sofas were total ghetto sofas, i.e. no leg on one side, frame coming loose and cracking, snagged dirty upholstery, and futon sofa with slashed futon and springs sticking out all over. They got dumped in the front yard, the cushions lying all over exposing just how dirty it was under them. Meanwhile the new, very nice and clean sofas were put in place, just in time for a bunch of party goers to smear gunk all over them. Other than the sofas all over my front yard, (Why yes, I have dirty rotten sofas as yard ornaments all the time, for all you who have never been to my house, especially a co-worker to see, come on in and make yourselves comfortable!) by the time the party started, I was ready. Good thing, counting siblings and birthday boys there were 19 kids in attendance. Enigma was busy getting ready for her performance but Gigio was a great assistant and my sister arrived with the cousins and stayed to help too, thank goodness. We had Papi man the pinatas and since he was doing a bunch of things at once, that was his contribution.

We had them put together a little transformer figure and make transformer hats, then we did a treasure hunt to look for the Allspark and did a Transformers vs. Bionicles bingo and did a carnival type knock over the bionicles game. Then we let them hit balloons into the air with those foam things you get for pools and did the pinatas, then had hotdogs, pizza dip with pita chips, and had cake and ice cream. Then everyone played and opened presents. It was an extremely loud and wild party but everyone was good and everyone seemed to have a blast! Seeing as how Thing 2 didn't want to invite anyone before hand but his little girlfriends because everyone else in the universe had all done something before like push someone once, I'd say it was a success. I had to promise to put anyone who needed controlling in time out but no one had to go :). And, no one slimed the sofas! Can you believe that? Here's an album of our festivities.

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Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

Just how my week's gone...

Well, it’s been a busy week. J. is suffering with his leg, school, work, etc. E. has gotten sick, gone hiking and studying little teeny organisms in the water under a microscope, getting stung by a bee and a wasp and falling and scraping her leg. She changed jobs back to the restaurant. Both she and J appear to be co-dependents of the owner. On top of it all, she got her hair cut. It is really cute, but it is short. I think it’s the first time she has short hair by choice, and so it’s different for her. G and C are settling in well at the new school and work on the outside is moving along. D&D are busy and doing well in their class, amusing their teacher. One day they got too out of control fighting each other or something. So they got pulled outside and the teacher said, “Do you know why you are here?” One responded, “Because our mommy brought us to school!” D1 has made friends with some roly-poly bugs who are guests in his room. He talks to them like you talk to a dog or cat. Both those boys are the crocodile hunters of the insect world.
I’m just trying to survive and take care of the piles of files in my room. I managed to actually move one file box across the floor and look for a paper I needed, then it stayed there till D1 ran into it and hurt himself and I had to move it back to the spot it was at before. It looks like I will be going to an interpreter conference in Las Vegas the weekend of the 20th to get my continuing education hours in.
So I went to the dentist, but I didn’t get to sleep because it was a check-up and the hygienist was entertaining me with stories about her kids. That was as fun as sleeping, and my teeth feel so much better without all that tartar and stuff. I also read about sleep in the Reader’s Digest and saw a picture of a guy who tied enough helium balloons to his lawn chair to fly something like 9 miles through the air. So fun. Hopefully I will get to push a slinky down the Tikal ruins in Guatemala someday too. :)

The night before my birthday I was up late trying to find a shoe for a twin. I wish someone would start selling them in 3’s or 4’s. Is it just me or does anyone else have the lost shoe blues? They have two left Elmo sandals, no rights. And keeping track of 4 tennis shoes is so very hard. I might actually have to pull the weeds out of the garden that are supposed to just disappear under that 4 letter word that starts with S that we keep having sightings of this fall. I cannot tell how many times I have almost had to go out in slippers or two shoes that don’t match thanks to my kids’ playing with them. My new sandals lost each other till fall so I didn’t get to actually wear them really. One year a shoe disappeared one fall only to appear under the living room window in the flower bed next spring when the snow thawed. D&D have actually swapped one shoe with each other to wear mix and match, or if their favorite pair has lost one, they just mix with another pair. Right now they only have the sandals and the tennies and I can’t seem to bear to let them mix them. I’m not sure why open and closed shoes can’t mate, but I guess I’m just old fashioned. Eventually the missing shoe turned up, but it’s gone again now. In any case, I got to bed only to be woken up in the wee hours of the a.m. by a barfing child. Then when I got back to my bed, 2 little people had taken over my place. (sigh). The next day I realized that one switched beds because he got his own wet. More fun for me. I got everyone off to school and worked in the a.m. and then I met with the Blogging Babes for lunch. It was fun. I haven’t had a chance to sit with a bunch of ladies in a long time and they are a group of great and interesting people. I was so excited I won the basket with the chocolate and Candace Salima’s books. I love bittersweet chocolate and drinking the Xoçai is way better than drinking Glucosamine with Chondroitin. I’d like to thank Candace for getting us all together. Then it was off to get the kids, then off to speech, then back to get visit taught, and my VT brought me a cake, which we loved and then I finally got the chance to notice that I got a gift from the Relief Society presidency and from my husband, a wheeled portfolio that holds a laptop and other files together. Cool! My kids meanwhile were rearranging furniture and breaking windows. I gave up on getting a real meal together and just let everyone make kid foods like macaroni and hot dogs. The bishop came by with a birthday card too and then it was time to get everyone to bed again and start the whole shoe routine, which is where we loop back around to the beginning of those 24 hours and start all over again. Yesterday J. took me to Outback and I still have leftovers to eat now.
(AND NOW A REAL UTAH MORMON MOMENT:)
While conference is going on, I’m trying to organize my room and hope against hope something miraculous will happen to the files. The weather isn’t helping my kids go out to play and stay out of my hair, so it’s sort of one of those days where you want to kill the kids so you can hear the talks about how to love the kids and raise them in loveJ. However, it is way easier to hear than Sacrament meeting where they are forced to sit right next to me. At least I can tell you what the talks were about, and thanks to the internet in a day or two I can just go to lds.org and relive the whole experience in just about any language imaginable. So cool. I have to say I think Brother Eyring will be a great counselor. I heard part of a news conference afterwards on the BYU channel and someone said people were out blogging about the new apostle E. Cook being called, because he’s another born in Utah guy. I don’t know him that well, but Brother Eyring assured the press that not to offend anyone but he never thought of Brother Cook as a Utahn. It was something he got over young in life, he went on to become a Californian. Ha! I rest my case. I’ve been sort of bummed that I haven’t had an overwhelming response by people wanting to join :

UTAHNS ANONYMOUS.

(See my very first blog post.) I suppose a lot of people of course don’t actually even live in Utah so they are excused. Of the people who are, a big percentage are born and raised here so what in the heck else could they be? If they weren’t Utahns, the rest of us wouldn’t have anything to avoid being. But where are all the transplants? Were you all just Utahns somehow born out of your element, or have you become closet Utahns who are living in denial and can’t even admit to yourselves what you have become? Or maybe you are just stronger than me and are entirely untainted by the environment in which you live. I would really like to know. These meetings with myself are getting lonely. Yes, this is an overt invitation to you to join, please sign up via comments or e-mail.
Actually, I have a theory about why international people are not being called much to apostleship and it is simply because they are so desperately needed where they are being called to serve in the Seventy callings, out in the world. The growth is so very fast and crazy out in many of these places and more stability is needed there, up close and personal. Whatever the reason, I figure God knows what he is doing, or at least what his kids are up to, and I trust him to handle it just fine :)
And last of all, I have to tell my funny Henry B. Eyring story. When I was a teenager I had a bizarre dream that the second coming of Christ had already happened and I was in a room and someone was telling me that I wasn’t married yet, but I could of course make it into the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom anyways, because they were setting all us single people up with spouses, and they presented to me my spouse who looked a whole awful lot like Bro. Eyring. I said, “I’m sure he’s nice, but don’t you have someone closer to my own age?” When he was called later on to the General Sunday School I recognized him. What a hoot! We actually learned about him in a religion class and he is pretty cool. Gotta go, conference is back on!