Kate's 4th Birthday - Bowling

Kate requested going bowling as a family for her birthday.

We had a great time! Well... mostly.

Claire discovered that the removal of bumpers alters the difficulty of the game significantly. Based on the bowling lanes policy, Claire was too old/too tall to use the bumpers.  We encouraged her to try to learn to bowl without them.  This was met with mixed reviews.  By which I mean violent mood swings.  She couldn't decide if she was proud of herself for learning to get better or totally pissed off that Scott and Kate were getting higher scores than her.  It was not easy for my little natural athlete to score worse than her slightly gimpy little brother.  I need to show her these photos though, and maybe she'll feel better.

Claire looked like she was learning to bowl:

Scott looked like he was having a seizure that serendipitously rolled a bowling ball down the lane:

Birthday girl Kate was adorable, even when she pushed her ball so slowly it didn't make it down the lane:

And what could be more flattering than a rear photo of you helping your preschooler bowl?

(I'm sure M is thrilled to be featured thusly.) Here, I'll try to redeem myself by showing him actually bowling:

In the end, I'm willing to post a picture of our score because I at least managed to break 100.

And you can see why Claire wasn't too thrilled with her performance. I actually think she did GREAT for her first time without bumpers, but in her mind Scott and Kate's scores needed an asterisk afterword to signify their totally unfair bumper advantage.

But none of this matters, because Kate will tell anyone who asks that SHE won.

And as part of the bowling alley experience, we ordered some food from the snack bar.  (We may also have been hoping that a little blood sugar boost might help with Claire's bumper-bereft tragedy.)  And since it was Kate's birthday, we got chips and guacamole:

Kate LOVES LOVES LOVES guacamole. Unfortunately while I was returning my bowling shoes, I missed getting a photo of her trying to lick the guacamole directly out of the bowl. We might have let her get away with it, but there were still chips left.

Photography Challenge Day #23 - Sunflare

So I'm going to bend the traditional photographic definition of "sunflare" on this one.

Because when you're at your parents' house and you see this sunset, you decide it counts as sunflare and take a photo of it.

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is long over.  However, posts are definitely not daily.

My rules for my self are:

1 - Take everything in manual mode

2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Photography Challenge Day #22 - Hands

This is Kate's favorite outfit right now.  She was so proud of the stars I painted on her arm at Scott's end-of-school party to match the stars on her shirt.

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is long over.  However, posts are definitely not daily.

My rules for my self are:

1 - Take everything in manual mode

2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Phineas and Ferb Cupcakes

Claire and Scott had their birthdays several months ago, but they thought it would be fun to have a swim party at my parents' pool. So we waited until the weather warmed up and had a belated birthday/"Welcome to Summer Vacation!" party the day after school let out.

And what better theme to celebrate summer vacation than Phineas and Ferb?

There's 104 86 days of summer vacation...

I used the same frozen buttercream transfer technique as I used on Kate's Hello Kitty cupcakes a couple years ago. So easy! Made the little buttercream stickers on wax paper ahead of time and kept them in the freezer. The day of, I frosted the cupcakes, my sister helped me roll the edges in sprinkles, then we stuck the buttercream stickers on them! Voila!

But honestly, the cupcakes were about it. We had the same CD of aquatic-themed music from Kate's swim party last year playing. We kept things low key. The kids had a blast swimming, so they didn't need much else.

Just to keep it real, the rest of the "decorating" was this table with a few wild sunflowers cut from my parents' property:

I Can Has Cheezburger Cake?

My best friend's son wanted a cheeseburger birthday cake.  When she called me up to see how hard I thought it would be, we both took a gander at Pinterest and then decided we could probably do it.

Yesterday I went over to her house and we had a go at it:

Our hamburger cake turned out even better than we expected!

Nailed it!

But like, for reals, not sarcastic.

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If you want more details on how we made it, you can check out my friends' blog post:

http://geekilyeverafter.blogspot.com/2013/06/do-you-want-fries-with-that.html

Hair At Last!

Kate had her last day of preschool and I took a few pictures of her.  As I was looking at the pictures, I was able to take a step back and realize that she has long curly hair now!

When did that happen?  Just 2 years ago we were here:

At the time, Kate's hair seemed pretty straight and thin and it was growing SO SLOW!!!  I guess I was comparing Kate's hair to the way Claire's was at the same age.

I tried to find a photo of Claire at almost 4 years old to compare to, but I didn't have much.  I had to get creative to make it "bloggable," sorry.  This is a photo of Claire's hair at almost the exact same age as Kate is now:

Claire's hair:  Longer, thicker, and curlier than Kate. 

Still, while it's not quite Claire's hair, it feels like all of the sudden I've woken up to discover that  Kate's hair has really come into it's own.

(And thank goodness, because Kate is the one who actually requests that I do fun styles like this heart with her hair sometimes!)