Wyatt Dean, 4 Years Old

 

My sweet boy turned 4 on Friday.  He's still little enough that he can tell me he wants to marry me when he grows up without an ounce of self-consciousness, but he's big enough that he can write his name and go to school and build a fort (well, kinda--more like he can harangue me into helping him build a fort).  I'm just so glad we have a few more years of cute little-kidhood to enjoy in our house, since the other kids insist on wrestling with long division, scaring me into thinking there's an intruder in the house by calling my name in a deep manly voice, and wearing eyeliner. (You can decide which kid is doing which in the preceding list.)

On Friday, Wyatt brought treats for preschool and then the two of us met Dad at McDonald's (with a Play Place--unlike in Utah, not every single McD's has a Play Place in MN) and Wyatt opened his present from us: a Transformers mask he'd tried on the last three times we wandered through the toy aisle at Target, and a new game for his Leapster.

But on Saturday Wyatt had his first friend birthday party.  He's met a cute little group of kids at church and through the babysitting co-op and was so excited to have them over.  Two of the five kids we invited were girls, so we couldn't have the Transformers birthday he originally requested without making them feel a little left out, so we decided instead on having a Toy Story party.  Woody AND Jessie, you see?

I took advantage of the wonder of the internet and googled some Toy Story party ideas and found a few that were simple but fun--right up my alley!  I haven't done a little kid party in a while, and although I remember dreading them somewhat in the past, this one was actually kind of fun to plan.  Crazy, I know!  Here are a few of the highlights:

Thank you Disney.com for the cute Toy Story alien cupcake idea.  I find it particularly hilarious that I made these cupcakes the weekend after writing a Segullah post in response to the now-infamous Salon Mormon Mommy blogger article where I made a point of explaining that my husband makes most of the cupcakes at my house.  Now look at me!  A Mormon mommy blogger stereotype, and something of a hypocrite to boot!  But dang, aren't those cupcakes cute?  I wish the green was a little more lime-y than grass-y, but otherwise I was quite pleased.  And this is coming from someone who's experienced some wicked birthday-cake-making disappointments.  (Elise's 6 year old birthday My Little Pony cake debacle is a particularly tragic memory.)

And this is the table before the kids came. Each kid got a cowboy hat (although the girls weren't so keen on wearing them.  I guess they weren't feeling the Jessie vibe. Imagine if they'd been invited to the Transformer party!)

Then the kids came.  Such cute kids:

And even though I realize this isn't the most interesting thing to blog about and I could instead regale you with my opinions on the Republicans and Democrats deciding to sit with each other at the State of the Union . . . here are the games we played:

Game #1: Buzz Lightyear beanbag toss.  Forgot to take pictures of this one, but we have a bean bag toss game already, and I found this little Buzz Lightyear bean bag toy thingie at clearance on Wal-Mart. That's the only thing that made it Toy Story-ish, but the kids didn't seem to complain about going off theme too much.  Instead, they simply edged closer and closer to the wooden bean bag receptacle until they could basically drop the bean bag into the hole, then one kid stood on the wooden bean bag receptacle and cracked it.  Whoopsie!  The only real collateral damage from the party, though, which isn't bad considering there were six 3-4 year-olds in the house.

Game #2: Hot Mr. Potato Head.  Just like Hot Potato except one uses a Mr. Potato head.  Like in Toy Story!  Get it?  I downloaded "You've Got a Friend In Me" from iTunes and played it as the kids passed Mr. Potato head around.  When a kid got out, he/she got to take a piece of candy from the storage area in Mr. Potato Head's backside (hmmm, that sounds unsanitary), then the winner got to take TWO pieces of candy.  Seemed to work well: the kids who got out first got their candy first, and the kid who won got two.

Game #3: Buzz Lightyear Moon Rock Hunt.  I told the kids that Buzz Lightyear had crashed and dumped a whole bunch of moon rocks upstairs in our house.  Instead of putting their party favors in a goody bag at the end of the party, I wrapped the favors up on tin foil ("moon rocks") then had them all hunt for them.  They each got a thing of bubbles, a party blower, and a $1 bag of silly bands (bandz? harumph--I refuse to spell words with a z instead of an s), then I put their names on the "rocks" so that one kid didn't end up with 10 rocks and another with none.  They had a great time on the hunt and unwrapping their prizes.

Game #4: Of course, you gotta play pin the tail on SOMETHING.  Big thanks, again, to Disney.com for the Pin the Tail on Bullseye game I could print out for free:

Each of the kids had a Toy Story bandanna that I made (read: cut out but didn't hem) from some fabric I bought at Wal-Mart.  Quick funny story: I don't buy a lot of fabric, and I really don't buy a lot of fabric at Wal-Mart, so when I went shopping late Friday night to get last minute stuff for the party I wasn't prepared for how long it would take to find somebody to cut the fabric for me. Anyway, took a while.  But I finally got it cut and price-tagged, grabbed a few more things, waited in line for a Wal-Mart amount of time (3 1/2 minutes more than I would have spent in line at Target) . . . but when I gave the fabric to the checkout lady, the price tag had disappeared.  We both looked on the ground, on the other items, pretty much everywhere, but alas, no price tag to be found.  So we had to "suspend" my purchase and I headed back to the fabric counter to try AGAIN to find somebody to price it for me.  Waiting, ringing little ineffectal silver bell on table, stalking around grumpily, waiting some more, until finally I found somebody in the toy section who said she'd send someone else over shortly.  More waiting, more grumpy stalking, then finally a lady showed up.  I started to explain that I'd already had this cut and priced, I was at the checkout counter and everyone was waiting for me, etc etc., while in the midst of my breathless recitation she reached down and pulled the price tag off from the front of my coat in the area right under my chestal region (you know, the region that I'm least likely to be able to see without the assistance of a mirror.)  Stuck there the whole time!  Sigh.

Last game: pinata!  The pinata broke after the first couple of whacks at it, but luckily McGuyver dad figured out a way to rig it up:

One of the final swings, to jostle out the few remaining morsels of candy.

The kids ate their alien cupcakes, vanilla ice cream, and root beer. (POP! I know, I gave them pop.  Funny how you can give them cupcakes and candy and nobody blinks, but give them pop and the kids look at you with a little thrill in their eye that means "if only my mother knew what I was doing!" We're a bad influence.)

They opened presents:

I love how little kids all hunker together in a big group to open presents and can't help but "help" the birthday boy open it.

They were just altogether cute.

We rounded out the party by watching a little Toy Story 3 on DVD and I wondered during the scary cymbal-banging monkey scene whether or not I was REALLY being a bad influence (pop + scary monkeys = who is this woman and does my mom know what's going on here??) . . . but all the kids assured me that they HAD seen this movie before, so I'm hoping I didn't send home kids who wouldn't go to bed due to a sugar high and then woke up with cymbal monkey nightmares.

Wyatt had a great time, and it's kind of nice to finally say he's four.  He's looked four for almost a year now, so it's about time!  We sure love our Bubba, though, and I secretly wish he'd never grow up.

So It's January

and that means a few things:

1. It's cold.  Whoda thunk.  And the snow just keeps coming.  Yesterday I pulled out the cell phone camera to snap a picture of Wyatt playing in the snow drifts while I scraped off the vestiges of that day's snowfall, and to prove that I do, in fact, venture out of doors every once in a while:

And here's our front yard.  The thing about Minnesota is that all the snow just accumulates.  It doesn't melt, it simply piles up and reminds you how far you've got to go before you see grass again:

Can you see our row of mailboxes off in the distance, the snow piled up to the bottom of the mailbox door?  It would be a hard job, delivering mail in Minnesota during the winter.

2.  Another thing about January:  it usually makes me feel a little funky.  Not terrible or anything--just sluggish, yearning for a little warmth but aware how far off spring really is.  And big news!  Forrest tells me (just now as a matter of fact) that Thursday night we're going to reach double digit below zero temps.  Without windchill.  So, yeah.  But you don't want to hear about my winter blahs on the blog do you?  No, of course you don't!  So I'll change the subject to:

3.  Period dramas!  An excellent cure for the winter blahs.  I've been going on a bit of a period drama spree with our new Netflix account, having rewatched a few old standards (Howard's End, The Age of Innocence, The Remains of the Day) as well as watching The Duchess with Keira Knightly for the first time (good, but a little racy, in a period drama kind of way), seeing The King's Speech in the theater with Forrest (SO excellent--and the only reason it's R is because he lets out a string of swear words during a session of speech therapy, otherwise it's totally PG, not even PG-13--not that you should be watching rated R movies, heavens), and devouring the new BBC series Downton Abbey on PBS.  If you haven't started watching Downton Abbey yet, check your local PBS listings and see if you can catch the first two episodes in reruns.  There are two more episodes to go and I've found it utterly mesmerizing.  Plus it stars Elizabeth McGovern--the 80s actress some of you might remember from the Kevin Bacon movie She's Having a Baby (among others)--and I love seeing how her lovely face has aged in such a non-Hollywood way.  She's beautiful.  Anyway, all the period dramas must be serving as a bit of comfort-food-for-the-soul.  Why is it that these constrained, stoic, highly regimented societies are so fascinating, and even attractive?  Beyond the amazing clothes and servants-catering-to-one's-every-whim, of course.

4.  And finally, January means we're back in the swing of kid activities.  I've been doing a lot of chauffeuring: Jonas to choir and Battle of the Books; Ethan to speech (first tournament this weekend); Elise to guitar lessons and play practice.  Elise was excited to learn today that she got a solo part in the school play: she gets to sing "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better" from Annie Get Your Gun!  I still have a copy of my script from my foray as Nellie in the Cyprus High School production of Annie Get Your Gun when I was in the 6th grade.   I remember getting out my yellow highlighting pen and marking my lines AND my suggested costumes on the back--oh, the thrill!  So it's particularly exciting that Elise gets to sing this song.  I'm so happy for her.  Forrest has been keeping busy with work, but a good kind of busy.  He's enjoying being back in the thick of things at headquarters and he's looking forward to an upcoming trip to Germany.  He's also cross country skiing like a mad man, venturing out in ridiculously cold temperatures to go tromp around in the snow at 7:30 a.m.  Yes, opposites attract, apparently.  (See staying home and watching period dramas, above.)

And that's January thus far.  This weekend we're celebrating Wyatt's birthday with his first friend party--a Toy Story theme.  He's so excited he can hardly stand it.  Photos to come!

Happy New Year!

I hope all of you had a fun New Year's Eve and are spending today contemplating the myriad ways you plan to improve yourself in the next twelve months.  (I, for one, have spent today--after going to church, of course--eating leftover ham, reading a book on my new Kindle, and losing a game of Scrabble to Forrest by 8 measly points.  But I hope YOU are contemplating.)

We did have a fun New Year's Eve, though.  It seemed to me that after so many years of muy excellente New Year's parties at our place involving different combinations of Mindy and Pete, Tony and Cindy, Andrew and Andi, Amy and Dave, and various cousins and grandparents, that it would be muy triste (that's "very sad" in Spanish--I looked it up for the sake of parallelism) to let this New Year's go by without a little fun.  So we invited three other couples and their kids and had a really good time eating, playing SingStar (of course!--and even though I'm convinced nobody SingStars like our family, we got the group at our house going and I had to force most of them to stop so we could play Taboo.  Why won't anyone ever play Taboo with me without arm-twisting, I ask you????)

Here are some shots of the fun:

A little Bananagrams action.  A bunch of the teenagers, including Ethan, left at 9:00 to go to the Multi-Stake dance in Minneapolis.  We missed them . . . but I don't think they missed us. :-)

I'm glad to finally be able to use our big center island for a large group and lots of food.

Wyatt and his friend Max singing Pink's "Rock Star."  (Wyatt's version of this song goes like this, and has for months: "So what! / I'm still a Rock Star! / and it's a New Year! / Yes it's a Neeeeww Yeeeeaar!"  His version seemed appropriate for the evening.

Another shot of Wyatt and Max.  They had a ball dressing up like "Injas" (ninjas, you know) and running all over the house.  Wyatt finally crashed a little bit before 11, when our neighbor Steve came downstairs and said he'd tucked Wyatt in bed. :-)

This is Steve.  And his wife Becky.  They live just one street down from us in our neighborhood and have been great friends to us and our kids since we moved in.  A real answer to prayer.  Their cute oldest daughter [I'm not putting names because I don't know how these guys feel about names on blogs, so I'm being safe and conscientious here] is in the chair, unable to go to the dance because she just had surgery on her foot. 

Steve and Becky's son and Jonas, dancing on the front porch in sub-zero temperatures to herald the new year.

And Steve and Becky's OTHER daughter with Elise at the stroke of midnight.  I have a special fondness for this sweet girl because she let Elise sit with her and her friends at lunch from day one of middle school.   

Steve and Becky  have one more child, a boy who's Ethan's age, but both he and Ethan were at the dance at the fateful hour.  (The two of them went skiing at the local resort a few days ago and I was going to take pictures then, but forgot.  Whoopsie!) Forrest went to go pick up the kids from the church, so by the time the kids were picked up and dropped off and home, we didn't get to bed until a little before 2 a.m.! I don't think I've stayed up that late for years and years and the next day I felt it in my bones.  But we had a great time, and it was worth staying up that late because Ethan had a blast at the dance.  I've been so grateful for the really strong youth groups in our ward and for all the opportunities they have to do fun stuff together.

And now it's 2011!  Can you believe it?  I can't.  Man, I'm old.

Finally, here's the promised video of the kids' Christmas skit, written by Ethan and rehearsed by all in about an hour on Christmas Eve day.  The picture quality isn't the greatest (it was kinda dark) but I think you can get the feel of it anyway.  Gotta love those kids of mine.