Wednesday, December 17, 2014

15 on the 15th: December

Here I am again documenting our day on Monday. I tried a few new settings on my camera to try to learn something.....but I think I might need to actually take a class or something to figure out how to take artistically pleasing pictures. For now, I'll just document life.











Sam finally got up on his own in hockey - he was SO proud of himself.


On our way to the Homeschool Christmas Party


Stopped to look at Christmas lights on the way home


And that's a wrap! Next month we should have a new baby in the house.......crazy!

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Brian & Elijah's Minecraft Birthday Party

I don't quite understand the minecraft craze, but my kids sure love it. Brian was so excited to get the full game for his birthday. They had just been playing the demo version which you can't save or do multiplayer.

Anyway, so the boys wanted to have a minecraft birthday party. There are loads of ideas on pinterest and after letting them search and pin some ideas, I helped narrow down the potential craziness to a few simple games and decorations.

We started out with some minecraft coloring pages that I just found online and printed off, then we ate "creeper" pizza


I found this free printable minecraft bingo. It was great, but it was kind of hard for the kids (especially those who couldn't read well yet) to see if they had the item on their card.

 After bingo, we did the "ghast" pinata. I made the pinata just with a cardboard box wrapped in white paper with streamers hanging down. Elijah drew the face.


We also made a little bean bag toss creeper game (you can see it in the bottom left). But we don't have bean bags, so we used some blocks to toss instead. The kids just played with it in between activities on their own.


After the pinata, we had cake and lava (orange sherbet ice cream with cream soda pop). If you're familiar with minecraft, you'll recognize that this cake looks like what cake looks like in the game. It really was a miracle that it ended up looking ok. It was super crumbly (I just used a cake mix) and the icing was not sticking on the sides. It was just falling apart because it was too heavy. Of course this was all happening 10 minutes before the party was starting...... I called John (cause he is the icing expert in our household), and his advice of adding a little milk and whipping the icing for a few minutes made the icing not so thick so that it ended up working out.  I just added some cocoa to make the brown icing and the red squares are fruit roll-ups. I really was happy with the end result....and so were the boys, so all was good.





Another birthday over!