Party Number 2

For our second party of the season, we headed down to Las Cruces to celebrate with the family down there.

Naomi has 2 girl cousins who both have birthdays within a month of hers, so we typically celebrate all three together, we'll see how that goes as they get older.

Each girl has different tastes of course, but I didn't want to make 3 different cakes (although the one cake is 3 different flavors...).  Naomi likes a Japanese movie called My Friend Totoro, so I made a little Totoro for her side of the cake.  Hannah loves Star Wars, and if you look on top of the castle you can see Luke and Darth Vador dueling (they are on top of the castle because the girls will all be going to Disneyland later in the summer and this is when they found out), and Jessica loves dinosaurs, so she got 3 friendly dinosaurs on her side.

This is Naomi and another cousin, Christina, who lives in Las Cruces.  We can Naomi Christina's mini-me because they look so similar (you should see pictures of Christina when she's younger, the resemblance is amazing!).

To complete the Disney theme we rented a Princess bouncy.  The kids all had a great time in there, and while there were no injuries, the bounce house did deflate at one point which scared some kids.

One of her birthday gifts was a bat, ball, and glove to play baseball.  Naomi has talked about playing baseball for a while (especially since we go watch Isotopes games during the summer), but I always figured she was a little too young.  Boy did she prove me wrong!  She was great at it!  Within 5 minutes of starting she was already hitting balls that Yaya pitched to her.  Just goes to show that I don't always know ;-)

Party Number One!

It's that time of year again!  Birthday time!!!

It's hard to believe that Naomi will be six in just over a week.

For her 'friends' party this year, we booked a party at one of the local Bounce House places.  March weather here is not usually nice enough to have outdoor parties, and I didn't want to have to clean the house before or after 20 5/6 year olds ran through it!

My camera was dying, so the shots are limited, but the kids had a great time :-) 

Naomi invited her entire class, many of her MOMS Club friends, and her cousins!

This is the first room where they climb around in a huge jungle gym/obstacle course for 45 minutes.  They then move on to the bouncy room where they can choose to go down huge slides, through inflatable obstacle courses or just jump around.  The kids were WORN OUT! 

Naomi still loves the characters from 'How to Train Your Dragon' so the folks over at Say it With Cake made her an awesome fondant toothless for the top of her cake.

Toothless came home with us and hasn't been eaten yet...but I figure his days are numbered...

Suspiciously Quiet

You know when your kids are little, and you suddenly realize they've been suspiciously quiet for too long?  I feel like I've been that way recently.  The truth is, we have been up to something, but in a good way!  We have redone the floor and paint in our great room and part of our front room.

Here is the end product:

Now let's see how we got there!

 This is a good shot of our new paint color.  It is similar to the color we had in there for the last couple of years, just a bit darker.

 Here are the guys laying the new flooring.  Thank goodness a coworker of Michael's and his father came to help because it would have taken us FOREVER!

This is a picture of the room before the carpet and laminate were ripped out, but after the pony wall had been torn down. 

 Michael working on taking the pony wall out.  I'm sure this wall was a good idea for some people, but for us it divided the room too much and was a great area for stuff to accumulate.

 We invited one of Naomi's cousins to come draw on the pony wall before it was torn down.  I did this with my family as a kid before we took a wall down to add an addition on to our house and I still remember how much fun it was!

We love our new floor and new look for the rooms!  Hopefully we'll be able to get everything sorted out and rehung soon!