Brielle's Birthday Party

 For Brielle's 7th birthday, she wanted an Angry Birds party.

 In addition to their pizza lunch, they had grapes, which were supposed to be bird eggs, and lime jello jigglers, which were smooshed piggies, and then gummi worms, because of course birds have to have worms.  ; )

It was a pretty active and intense party, and so I don't have many photos of the kids playing the games.  The kids used tiny catapults (made by Russell) to knock down plastic cup towers with piggy faces.

 Another picture of the cake.

 The kids used a sling shot to knock down piggies on wood blocks.

 The favorite activity was probably knocking down the boxes with the stuffed animal Angry Birds.  With all of the projectiles we had launching around, it's amazing that no one was injured!

 Then the kids played an Angry Birds bingo game, which was a nice quiet (well, quieter) game for a change.

 All of the crew

We can't believe how quickly Brielle is growing up.  She's such a fun, happy girl. She loves playing with friends, doing anything outside, and doing girly things: dressing up, painting nails, dancing, doing crafts, hugging anything fluffy, cooking, etc.. .  We're grateful that she is in our family!

Back to Christmas

We did so many fun things over Christmas and there are several that I haven't been able to find pictures of, so I thought I'd do a summary of all of our great activities.

1.  We went to Santa's Workshop, the kids loved decorating cookies, tolerated Santa, and had a ball with the fake snow.
2. We saw the movie Life of Pi, I had to keep reassuring Brielle that the boy wouldn't get eaten by the tiger, since it's the grown-up boy telling the story.
3. We saw the movie The Hobbit (without kids)
4. We went to Disney on Ice, and watched 3 different Disney movies acted out by ice skaters.  Clara loved seeing Mickey and Minnie, and the older kids sat enraptured the whole time.
5.  We saw the movie Wreck it Ralph, which I highly recommend!
6. We celebrated Kathryn's birthday.
7. We swam.
8. We opened a lot of presents
9. We saw the movie Les Miserables
10. We went to Lego Land, which was very crowded, but the children loved the rides, and were thrilled to be there.
11. The traditional Christmas Pudding was served, Brooke found the nut and won the prize.
12. Grandma and Grandpa had a food truck come to the house, and everyone ordered whatever they wanted for lunch.
13.  They rented a large bouncy house, which the children thoroughly enjoyed for several hours, rain and shine.
14. More swimming, an outside fire, roasting of marshmallows.
15. Grandma organized a Bingo Game for the kids, with awesome prizes.
16. Grandma created a scavenger hunt for the kids, with even more prizes!
17. Grandma set up a large real-life Angry Birds game that the kids could have played all day.
18. We had family pictures taken.
19.  We had a Candy Party
20.  We had a Dance-Party/Minute-to-Win-it-party on New Year's Eve.

And of course we did a lot of relaxing, the kids played with their cousins non-stop, and even though everyone ended up sick at the end of it, we had a great time.