Off With Her....

Training Wheels!!

Disclaimer: These videos are kinda long with the important parts at the beginning. I just kept the video rolling.

By the way...Marina came in this morning around 7am asking to go out and ride her bike!! She's so proud of herself...and we are too!!

Another One Bites The Dust

My Hillbilly

Harley is quickly becoming our toothless wonder! She has just lost another tooth. It was one of her top front ones, and the other one is not going to take much longer to come out either. She also has some more loose ones on the bottom! She's not going to be able to eat if she keeps this up!

Oh, and Ryker is NOT all to happy about Harley loosing all of her teeth. He has yet to even get a wiggle!! He'll be 9 in November and we don't see him losing any teeth in the near future. Poor kid. When he saw Harley pull her tooth out, he just let out this sad sigh. I keep telling him, he's gonna be missing teeth when he goes out on his first date!!

Aspen starts Volleyball

Aspen started playing volleyball!! She's been asking to play since before we moved to Indy, but I haven't been able to find any youth leagues. Well, I found one. It's takes us 45 minutes to get there, but we found one! Ha Ha This organization has a club volleyball league, but we just have Aspen in their recreational league. We don't have the time or the money to start doing travel ball! She did a summer camp with them during the summmer and loved it, so we signed her up for the 5 week league. They hesitate to call it a league, though, because it's just their own group of girls. They just end up playing more scrimmage type games. She does get more of a "training camp" type atmosphere, though, since it's just them. I really love the group of people involved in this, so that makes the drive for us worth it. It'll be over October 3rd, so I know she'll be sad, but hopefully they'll have other programs like this soon.

Under The Sea

We had a great Under the Sea Party for Marina's 5th Birthday. It all came together so nicely! We spent about 4 hours and used over 1500 feet of streamers to make it all happen, but it was totally worth it.

When Marina's friends arrived, we had them color a coloring book that I had put together until everyone had arrived. "Everyone" included 11 4-6 year olds! It was crazy and loud, but super fun. After they all arrived, we ate octopus hotdogs, goldfish crackers, and blue jello w/ fish gummies. The octopus hotdogs were a hit! Do a search on Youtube for them to see a tutorial. They are super easy and the kids got a kick out of them.

Then, we played lots of games. We played "Fish, Fish, Shark" (Duck, Duck, Goose), we let them jump up and down on bubble wrap, we had crab walk races, and mermaid races, pinned the crown on Ariel, and did the limbo. Aspen and Sierra had lots of fun taking that over and helping the girls.

Then, we opened presents. Thomas certainly had all the girls' attention! Obviously, all of the presents she got were totally girly, and so as she opened each one, he would say things like, "I love to wear those!" or "Those are my favorite!" She got blendy pens from her cousin, and Thomas said, "Ooooh, I'm gonna color in my underwear with those!" Thomas said it was the most fun he's had in awhile. He LOVED all the No's and giggles and looks he got from all the girls.

After we opened presents, we made these sand art seashell necklaces. Only, we didn't use colored sand, we used colored sugar!! They turned out really cute, and the girls, of course, didn't mind that it was pure sugar. Then we sang Happy Birthday, and ate the ice cream cone cupcakes that Marina helped me make. They turned our really yummy, and the icing that I found was awesome!! You gotta try it!! It's from Pillsbury and it's called Easy Frost. I loved it, and it made frosting the cupcakes a breeze.

Then the girls just played with balloons and did the limbo until their parents came to pick them up. Overall, I think it was a complete success, and am so glad that we could make Marina's first "friend" party a memorable one! I am going to be trying to take some better pictures of how we decorated. We changed the light bulbs in the room to blue ones, so the pics came out really dark. The ceiling really looked like waves when we had the fans blowing on the streamers. It was so fun!

Wish you all could have been here!

Happy Birthday Lil Red!