Caroline's "Lucky Seven" Birthday Party!

We celebrated Caroline's 7th birthday on St. Patrick's Day, which was actually her due date, although she was born four days later.  So we themed it her "Lucky Seven" St. Patrick's Day birthday party!

Here's a sign I made using a Celtic/Irish style font found free online somewhere.

Caroline decorated the table with this St. Patrick craft she'd made. Cecilia made one as well.  

This shamrock sign greeted guests at the door.

We decided to have a whole day of the Irish theme, beginning with...

~Breakfast~

Irish Oatmeal (the maple cream, while far from being Irish, makes this soooo good!)

Shamrock Eggs

Caroline enjoys her special breakfast!

After everyone had arrived...

~Lunch~

Shamrock Punch (just chilled Sierra Mist and lime sherbet)

Cabbage Salad, brought by my mom (she also brought corned beef, but I don't have a photo)

Irish Flag veggie tray

Irish Fruit Salad, in the colors of the flag

and for the adults, Irish Stout

Yummy!

Cecilia eating... we used St. Patrick's Day plates and birthday cups!

Caroline made herself the crown - golden with green accents

~The Cake~

I made, at her request, a mint chocolate cake using a Wilton shamrock cake pan.  The frosting is just whipped cream, so edging the cake in green M&Ms defined the shape better.  I was lucky to have had about half a bag of leftover Christmas M&Ms; otherwise I never would have had enough greens!

~The Guests~

(who I'm sure appreciated being photographed while eating)

My mom and dad

Chris with his dad and mom

My brother Mike and his wife and their baby, Chloe (missing the elusive Julianne; maybe that's who Mike is looking at!)

See how everyone wore green?

Lucy was in attendance, of course, even in a green carrier at times.

Here's Caroline about to blow out the candles!

She wanted the seven candles to be stuck on top of the number 7 at the bottom of the cake.

Here's Julianne, still for the few minutes it takes to have a little cake!  She was a few days away from turning two here - her birthday is the day after Caroline's.

~The Gifts~

We gave Caroline a little pair of purple glasses for her doll.

We also gave her a nightgown, which she'd been wanting.  I found a handmade one that is a pioneer style... she's into Little House on the Prairie!

Cecilia wearing some ribbons

Caroline received many other nice gifts from her extended family.  Thank you!

Lucy with a bit of sticky-uppy hair

Her onesie says "Made in America with Irish Parts."  I like it because she can continue to wear it all spring/summer because it's not just for St. Patrick's Day!

And what would an Irish party be without a good old-fashioned brawl?

Those red-headed Irish babies can get pretty violent when they've been drinking too much! ;)

(of course, you know I did not let my baby drink beer.  exclusive breastfeeding, virgin gut and so forth)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, and Happy Birthday, Caroline!!!

A bit late... next goal, Easter photos!

Not So PC...

politically correct, that is.  I guess if they are actually Chinese, it's okay for them to poke fun at themselves.  I first saw this place, in Jacksonville, Florida, probably 20 years ago.  I was taken by surprise to see it is still there!  Funny stuff...

Apologies for my very intermittent blogging... and that this is the best I can do right now, ha ha!  Baby Lucy seems to be in a limbo stage of development: she wants to try to do things (and acquiring new skills constantly - babbling the "b" sound constantly, trying to pull up on furniture, and grabbing everything that gets near her, including my water bottle, which she even managed to get a sip of water through the straw!), and she gets frustrated easily.  Why can't I tear the pages of that book Mommy is reading to Caroline?  Why can't I climb over stuff yet, but I can start to and then fall over?  And why can't I get back up myself when I fall over?  Why can't U pull Mommy's placemat into her lap?  And why does Mommy always have to do stuff in the kitchen, which I am apparently tired of seeing?  At least, I am guessing these are the things she's feeling, but probably in a more primitive way, like, "I want to do it - I can't - WAAAA!"  So times are rough right now.  But I assume the frustration of one stage is what helps boost babies into the next phase of developmental accomplishments at this age.  While I highly doubt that a three month old can experience boredom and this type of frustration, I think a six month old can.

So anyway, I don't get much blogging done.  And really not much more than basic schooling with Caroline.  It's a better-than-expected day if I can read just one whole book to Cecilia, and it's a miracle if I can do that plus one chore, like cleaning the bathroom sinks. And seeing other people's blogs or hearing about other people's lives and what they are able to accomplish is depressing to me at first, but then I take a step back and think that I can always do more elaborate things - and blog about them too so we have the memories recorded! - when I don't have a baby.  Maybe when I have an 18 month old, or two year old... I won't have a baby to hold and nurse forever, but I will have many years with older children to do special things, and even if there is another baby with older kids, then they can do some of the fun stuff themselves.  And maybe they can even take photos so I'll remember it years later!

School Stuff from February

Well, I have some fun stuff we did for school way back almost two months ago... first, we made a landform cookie cake!!  This is something I made up on my own back when I taught third grade... with my students, they'd make landform cookies after completing a study of landforms.  Each child got a sugar cookie and had to decorate it with at least ten different landforms.  So, with my own kids, I thought even bigger and went for a huge cookie cake to decorate with landforms!

We started out with a chocolate chip walnut cookie cake recipe that I modified slightly (subbing whole wheat flour and Sucanat).  I made it on our largest pizza pan (what, you don't have multiple pizza pans?  We have three - and I didn't buy a one of them!).  Once it had cooled, I cut the "shoreline."  Caroline gave me a diagram of how it should look after I explained to her that the cookie cake was like part of a large continent and the pizza pan was the ocean.  Then I whipped up some basic frosting (cream cheese, I think?) and tinted it with our natural food colors (which don't always work super-well, but they did nicely here... bright fake green for the land would look weird anyway).

Here's Caroline's plan next to the completed landform cookie cake.  I always had my students draw a plan first too, and then I took photos of their cookies to evaluate them later.  Nice thing about homeschooling: I don't have to fill out a rubric to give this project an actual "grade!"

Close-up: ocean, island, bay, mesa, peninsula

You can click on this to see it better... she ended up including lots of landforms.  In addition to the ones mentioned above, there were mountains, a volcano, hills, rivers, tributaries, oxbow lakes, regular lakes, a delta, an isthmus, a glacier, plains... and we talked about where the sources, mouths, and confluences of the rivers were.

And boy, was it yummy!!!

For about a week, his little guy visited our maple tree in the afternoons while we were outside.  He spent a lot of time on our neighbor's maple, too, and he made lots of holes.  We observed how wet the tree was around the holes he'd made and how the fresh sap attracted insects.

Here's a closer shot... we identified the bird as a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The next week, we participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count.  By then, this guy had moved on, but we still got to identify lots of birds, including house finches, cardinals, crows, chickadees, tufted titmouses/titmice (?  they aren't even rodents, so I don't get their name at all!), mockingbirds, and a brown thrasher.  We now know the scolding call of our mockingbirds quite well, and even Cecilia will say, "There's Mocker!" upon hearing it, without even seeing the bird.  We have been reading The Burgess Bird Book and learning lots of interesting things about birds this year!

Here are the girls at our nature club one day...

one of the few days it was actually cool enough for long sleeves...

And now for cute baby photos... she's much older now than she was in these photos!

between 4.5-5 months, I think closer to 4.5

hmm, a bit over 5 months, I think?

and these were taken the day she turned five months.. now she's over 6.5 months!