Happy Birthday dear J!

Happy Birthday J! This week has been all a bout J and he won’t let us forget that HE is the birthday boy. This has been the soundtrack for the week.  Monday we colored dozens of paper dinosaurs to hang for the party.

Tuesday we finished painting the piñata and J added ‘artist’ to the list of things he wants to be when he grows up. For the record, he specifically wanted, and got, a Protoceratops piñata, not a Triceratops.  Apparently it's all in the placement of the horns!?!?

Wednesday we headed down to Hot Springs where J and S were Jr. Paleontologists for the day at the Mammoth Site. J dug up a giant short faced bear skull and S found a mammoth’s femur! (They were just replicas of course, but exciting all the same.)

AND THURSDAY we partied! Technically it wasn’t his birthday, but for the sake of our sanity we moved all the festivities up so we could really enjoy them AND still have time to get ready for Father’s Day and our trip. We made sidewalk paint (equal parts cornstarch and water plus food coloring) and painted huge dinosaur tracks the whole length of our driveway to welcome our guests. We hung up the party lights and the piñata and I frantically put the finishing touches on my gifts to Joseph.

The guest list and plan included a couple of families over for dinner. The menu was simple but the kids did get Jello giggler eggs with plastic dinosaurs hidden inside them. After dinner we had our own dinosaur dig in our backyard and the kids excavated plastic dinosaur skeletons. Then the piñata met its demise at the hand of the birthday boy and we all went back inside for cake and ice cream.

You may have noticed that decorating the cake is one of my favorite parts of the birthdays in our family. I was particularly happy with the way this one came together. I printed out some images of dinosaur skeletons at the size I wanted.

I laid waxed paper over the images, melted white chocolate in a baggie, snipped a tiny hole in its corner and traced the images with the melted chocolate.

They looked so good!

Then I used chocolate and caramel frostings, rock candy and Oreo crumbs to make the geological strata, and voila! the perfect Jr. Paleontologist birthday cake!

He loved all of his gifts. I made him a deer antler hat and a dragon cape so he has some fun things to dress up in too when Sage goes all princess on us.  I was inspired by these on page 70 of paper mache magazine, but wanted a boyish version.  So I thrifted a brown ball cap, bent a couple of wire coat hangers, tore some of M's old pants into strips and reved up the glue gun.  I wraped and glued the strips around the wires and glued the whole thing together.  It was just fun!!  It's a bit heavy, but like they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, eh?!  As of yet, I haven’t gotten a good photo yet of him in the dragon cape, because he is an absolute blur dragonly activity whenever he has it on.

I love the "deer in the headlights" look in this shot!

M gave him a toy electric guitar which he LOVES; and he even lets J play with it quite a bit too. :) He got binoculars which he calls “bee-noculars”. He got lots of dinosaurs, some bakugans, a bubble machine, jammies; just tons of great stuff.

Since school is out the families stayed until ten o’clock. We gave everyone glow sticks and pulled out the telescope to show off the moon. J told me that his favorite part about his birthday party was that, “it went WAY into the night.”
M spent the next two days mowing lawns, mopping floors, chopping down dead trees etc. to prove that he deserved the title of BEST DAD IN THE WORLD! I snuck into the hobby room as often as I could to finish framing M’s diplomas and family photo for his office walls as a gift for Father’s Day. Saturday the older kids and I popped downtown to an arts and craft fair. It was unsurprisingly very disappointing.

M really is one of the best dads in the universe, and a good thing too, because I have some pretty high expectations set by my own awesome dad! Of course M had a super role model himself in Papa. I love all three of you!!! Happy Father’s Day.

PS you guys would not believe how excited I am that we found sego lilies growing in our yard!!!!! But then those of you who know me best would just maybe believe it.