Caleb's 4th Birthday!

My oldest son, the boy who first called me mama turned 4 yesterday, I could barely believe it! Well today we threw him a Star Wars Party at his request of course! We did a lot of the preparation together as a family DIY style! I absolutely love throwing parties, I wish I could do it full time.

Every good party starts with a great invitation. This invitation was really designed by everyone in the house (well maybe not Cullen). After I laid out the rough draft, Tony came back and corrected my 'yoda' language and Caleb picked the pictures.


After the invites, I started scouring the internet for ideas for the goodie bags and decorations. For the goodie bags I wanted to do something DIY so I made some R2D2 crayons using a mold I got on amazon. Of course we had to have a pinata, and what else but a Death Star. Unfortunately you can't find a death star pinata in the store so we decided (well Tony wanted) to DIY it. We found plans on http://www.starwars.com/ so we went for it. We ended up cheating a little (using spray paint instead of tissue paper), but hey it turned out. It was crushed in like 5 seconds so I'm glad we didn't spend more time than necessary. I also made some yummy snacks and other food, along with fun labels (star wars themed of course).

And you can't have a star wars party without light sabers!! We started the party with a create your own light saber activity. The kids took a light saber and picked a color to use (duct tape comes in lots of colors) then they added buttons (foam stickers!). The light sabers were very easy and cheap to make. Tony made them using PVC pipe, PVC end caps, and Pipe Foam Insulation. I think the total cost was under $1 a saber.


I didn't get a lot of pictures of the fun, hey even moms try to have fun at parties, but I did get a few candids. Caleb had a really great time, the best part I didn't get pictures of, but video. If I ever figure out how to share video on here maybe you'll see it!. All the kids took some light saber training (by none other than muah), then out of the blue, Darth Maul showed up. thank goodness so many trained jedi's were in the room, they destroyed him, it really is a funny video.

Kitchen Updating

If your my friend on FB you know we've been doing some updates to our Kitchen. We're not completely done, actually we have a lot more to do, but I thought I'd do mid before & afters since my kitchen was nice and clean and I had fresh flowers :)

BEFORE: *Notice - cabinets were raised, and counter extended into a bar.



AFTER:


BEFORE: *and of course the TILE!!!



AFTER:




This was such an easy update/fix, gives us some space to hide things that were normally sitting around our sink!


Things we still have to do:
Finish Tiling - we had to move an electrical box that was somewhat behind the stove so we only did one wall, I wanted to have the main part tiled before the party.
Clean up the tile and finishing touches with outlets/covers
Decorate Dining room (Ignore what's there now, that's up for Caleb's b-day party)
Pick an "accent" color, I'm gonna get rid of the red stuff, I'm thinking White, or just Stainless stuff.
Replace the vertical blinds with something else!

Day in our Life

It seems like its been forever since I just got out my camera just to get it out. So when Cullen was playing with his little car it inspired me and for the rest of the day I took a few shots here and there. I hope you enjoy the wordless story of our day.

Pinterest Craft for the Weekend

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I love pinterest.

This weekend we decided to do a child-friendly craft, one that turned out beautiful and was really simple to do to boot!

Here's the blog post that has the cutest how-to video: http://eisforexplore.blogspot.com/2012/01/bead-bowls.html

And here's our final project. Caleb did most of the 'work' but it was super simple. We used those fuseable beads from the craft section of jo-anns.