Happy Birthday Leo!

Leo turned 17 in February, so we had a little party for him. One of his friends brought over his karaoke machine and Leo and his friends spent most of the night singing songs. After having his first ice cream cake a couple weeks before, he requested that his birthday cake be an ice cream cake, so I got a yummy cake from Coldstone.

The cake and the birthday boy making his wish (notice the nice off-center picture courtesy of my broken camera!):

Backtracking- Jenson's 1st Birthday!

Following the tradition I started with Jefferson, I made Jenson's birthday cake to match his stuffed animal- the Elephant. I couldn't decide on a cake design, so I made two, hoping one would at least turn out, and I think they both came out better than expected!


With the candle


And the birthday boy!


Singing "Happy Birthday"


Impatiently waiting for cake


Testing it out


Digging in


Complete mess


Opening presents (after a quick bath)

Summer Adventures

We did have some fun this summer, but I don't have a lot of pictures to show for it since I kinda broke our camera. It still takes pictures, but it's now more like a film camera since I can't preview the picture anymore thanks to my clutziness that led to dropping the camera for the hundredth time (dropping it 99 times is okay, 100? Not good.) and breaking the LCD screen. Since the LCD screen on our camera is also the viewfinder, taking pictures isn't particularly easy, therefore causing me to just not bother taking pictures. Hopefully I'll be able to get a new camera soon (Nate: hint, hint!). Anyway, here are the few pictures I did take and a brief description of what we did:

(Click on picture to see it bigger!)

To start off, Jackson and Mason got some haircuts-
Befores:


After:


We took a trip to California to visit family, and during one of our pit stops the kids enjoyed watching a train pass by:


While in California we went to the California Science Center (a free museum!) and the kids enjoyed looking at some planes, among other things (and I dropped and broke our camera), while Jenson hung out in his carseat:


We also celebrated some birthdays, while in California:
First Mason's


Then Mason's and Jackson's together later in the week:


We also went to the Los Angeles Zoo (but sadly, did not find any of the wax animal dispensing machines :( ):


We swung by Travel Town in Griffith Park for a train ride:

We also went to the Griffith Park Observatory, but I guess I didn't take any pictures there.

We had some fun at a park in Ventura (and since I can't see what I'm taking a picture of, I can't always do a good job of centering the subjects):


On our way home from California, we got a flat tire:


In pretty much the middle of nowhere:


It was an adventure that caused us a six-hour delay in reaching our destination of St. George for the night. Which led to us taking another trip back to St. George a couple weeks later, in which we did some sightseeing and hiking, and swimming:

Yeah, just the one pic.

We also had a fun free day at this place called Libery Land:


We celebrated birthdays some more-
Jackson's actual birthday:


And Jefferson's:


The Primary had a bike parade:


Jenson tried some baby food for the first time:


Mason took some self-portraits:


And Jefferson started playing soccer this year:


I also managed to get a picture of the boys in which they are all looking at the camera, just not all smiling:

And here's one of just Jefferson and Jenson:


The End
(that's not all we did, but pretty much all I have pictures of...)

More of Jackson's words and Mason's new dog

I love how Jackson says "night night" when we put him to bed so I just had to get an audio clip of it (which means video for us). Here it is:


We went to IHOP this morning to celebrate my birthday and while we were paying our bill, Mason was looking at the stuffed animals that they have in the entryway. He found a dog that he just absolutely loved and instantly hugged and no matter how many other stuffed animals we showed him, he kept going back to the dog. They even had about 7 different dog stuffed animals, yet he had his heart set on the one particular dog. We just couldn't pass up getting it for him after watching him hug it so tightly and seeing how sad he was when we took it away from him. Here's a picture of him with it on the way home (he loves chewing on the ears):



So now Mason has 3 stuffed animal dogs and loves them all (and chews on all of their ears).

The Birthday Boys

I'm trying to catch up on some of the recent events and I figured that one post covering the three boys' birthdays would probably do.

Mason was the first birthday in June and like his older brothers' first birthdays, we decided the theme would be his stuffed animal, which is a dog (Jefferson had bears, Jackson has a monkey). Since I had purchased a special cake pan last year for Jackson's monkey cake, I figured I could make the pan more worth it by using it for Mason's puppy dog cake. The cake pan I used is Animal Crackers by Wilton. It can be used for various animal faces. Here is how it turned out:

My dad did most of the decorating, but the ears and color matching were all me. Maybe one year I'll try my hand at the actual decorating. I wouldn't mind taking a class.

Here's the birthday boy ready to have some cake:

At first, he didn't know what to think of having a giant piece of cake put in front of him. All he could do was say "oooo!"



But it didn't take long to figure out it was all his and dig in. He enjoyed every bite and made quite a mess in the process. Good thing we put a blanket down on the floor under him!



Yea! Now it's present time! Grandma got Mason a book about Dogs and we got him a t-shirt from our trip to the Coca-Cola store in Vegas, along with a few other things.




Toward the end of June, Jefferson and Jackson had a joint birthday party. Jackson is still young enough to not have enough of an opinion or understanding to protest, so we figure we'll do it that way as long as we can get away with it. The theme was CARS (and racing). Jefferson had originally chosen Hot Wheels as the theme, but I convinced him to change it to CARS when I found a CARS paper supplies kit at Costco for $15. The kit had tons of paper plates (in 2 sizes), bowls, napkins, cups, and placemats. I couldn't pass up the good deal. Just one package (of 8) of plates, cups and napkins would have cost the same.

Once again, I purchased a special cake pan for the cake. I was all set to just order the cake from the local bakery, but once I saw the pan and added up the cost of everything I needed, it cost about the same, if not a little less. The cake supply store had a CARS cake pan but Jefferson liked the NASCAR pan better, plus it made a slightly bigger cake. Jefferson was set on having a blue cake (his favorite color right now) and so we decorated (well, my dad decorated) the cake in Dinoco blue, just like in McQueen's vision.


The kids had fun making racecars out of candy, doing races around the orange cones that doubled as party favors, and hitting the pinata (sorry no picture).


Jefferson and Jackson enjoyed opening their presents and got right to work playing with the new train set from Grandma and Grandpa.