The rest of the birthday week

I took Dallin out for lunch the day before his birthday. He was in the mood for a burger, so we went to Carl's Jr. while we were out shopping for his party. I love taking my kids out one at a time - we had so much fun!

We made watermelon popsicles by blending the leftover watermelon from Dallin's birthday and freezing them in plastic cups. They were very tasty.

We had lots of fun with Dallin's balloon animal kit. We seriously need to get more balloons. We spent hours making fun hats and animals.

My nephew Andrew was visiting from Utah. He made himself a bowtie too.

A friend from church invited a bunch of us to her parents' pool a few days this summer. It's really fun there, with three different levels and a waterfall to jump off of/swim under.

My kids weren't too sure about going there the first time she invited us, because they thought it be all little kids. But the cousins went too, so that made it fun.

After awhile, even Brennan built up the courage to jump off the waterfall. Yay!
 

 

 

I'll close with 9 fun facts about Dallin:

 

1. he loves to perform - speaking, dancing, acting

 

2. he bears his testimony in church every month,

even when we're visiting another congregation

 

3. he loves to play with Chloe and make her laugh

 

4. his favorite color is red

 

5. his favorite dinner is tacos and watermelon

 

6. he is not a fan of roller coasters or diving boards

 

7. he loves to write stories about the adventures of Mr. Slinky

 

8. his favorite birthday present was a pocket knife

 

9. he is strong - it won't be long before he beats me at arm wrestling

Dallin's Watermelon Birthday

Dallin turned 9 and had a super fun birthday party a few weeks ago. We invited 6 friends (3 cousins and 3 friends from church) to go to the water park and used our half-off tickets we got when we signed up for summer passes. Plus we went after 3:00, making it even cheaper.

I never take my camera to the water park, but since I didn't have Levi and Chloe with me (I left them with Kristen), I didn't get in the water and was able to take pictures instead.

Tyler and Dave like the "toilet bowl" slide best. It's a little too fast and disorienting for me. My favorite are the tube slides.

 

Tyler also likes the "wedgie." I sat at the top once, but then I chickened out. It looks like it goes straight down. My boys are so much braver than I am!

Everyone had a great time. They pretty much stayed together in the wave pool and lazy river, but then they broke up into smaller groups for the slides. The two + hours went by really fast.



Then we drove everyone to our house for pizza and the rest of the party. As Dallin mentioned in his blog, it was a watermelon theme. I set up streamers to look like a big slice of watermelon. See the black seeds?

 

I loved how the cake turned out!! I found this on pinterest and pretty much made it exactly as described. There's pureed watermelon in the cake batter, chocolate chip "seeds," green fondant with painted darker green stripes, and a chocolate disk "stem." Those are real watermelon slices on the side, just for looks. When people walked into the kitchen, they thought it was a real watermelon sitting there.

 

Dallin is notoriously difficult to buy gifts for, but he loved everything he got for his birthday. Yay!

There's even some cocoa powder "dirt" smudges on the side. I had fun making this cake.

 

Is that beautiful, or what? It was tasty, too. I also made some watermelon cupcakes to make sure there would be enough for everyone (the rest of my family came for this part of the party), but I liked the watermelon slices best!

Pioneer Museum

My boys love old stuff, so every summer they ask to go to our town's Pioneer Museum. It's full of old stuff, and it's free.

It has very limited hours, and we forget from year to year what they are. We always end up going there when it's closed and then having to think of something else to do. One day we went to an antique store and art studio downtown instead.

                               The gun room                                       Levi, standing like the mannequin

The basement is full of old cars and carriages. Some come out for the Pioneer Parade in October.

They were very excited about this phone booth - something about Dr. Who.

Everyone's favorite thing there is the old one-room school house. It's where we always spend the most amount of time.

These pictures were taken right before I cut everyone's hair. They all look so shaggy!

I'll probably forget by next summer, but the hours are Thurs-Sat, from 1-4.



Summer Cooking Classes

When we sat down to plan our summer, my boys told me they wanted to have cooking classes.  The summer is almost over, and we've only had 2, but they were both great. First we made bread dough. I lined them all up at the counter, read off each ingredient, and passed it down the line so they could measure it and put it in themselves.

They each made a half a batch of basic white bread dough, and then they used their dough to make whatever they wanted. They chose cinnamon bread, pretzels, bagels, fried scones and monkey bread. I had just made a big batch of strawberry freezer jam, and that was especially tasty on the bread. 

 

Our second class was chocolate chip cookies. This was a great choice, because Spencer and Dallin have each made cookies on their own since the class.

 

 

It's amazing how many little cooking tips came up throughout our classes. We talked about dividing fractions (they each made half a batch), measuring wet versus dry ingredients, reducing the salt when using salted butter, altering cooking times for different pans, etc.

 Things got a little silly, as you can imagine. Amazingly, the cookies all turned out great.

After they finished making the basic dough, I got out a bunch of  yummy things and let them choose whatever mix-ins they wanted: semi-sweet chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, white chocolate chips, and Oreo chunks. No one wanted nuts.
 

Levi and Dallin wanted lots of everything. Spencer wanted just a few white chocolate chips.

Tyler wanted to make his S'mores-style, so we took his out of the oven 2 minutes early. He stuck half a big marshmallow on top and sprinkled them with graham cracker crumbs. Then we put them back in the oven for the last couple of minutes.

Oh my goodness, YUM!!

 

Brennan's cute French chef pose!

Dallin was so excited that he made these all by himself and can now have cookies whenever he wants! I thought about making muffins or some kind of dinner next, but I can't decide. What do you think we should do?