The Birthday(s)... Belated Post

(Side note: I decided to dispense with using only nick-names. I got tired of forever having to remember not to type the real one!)

Last weekend we had a double birthday. We had a party with extended family the day before the actual birthday(Saturday). Brannon turned eight and Jessie(my little sis) turned twenty-one. Birthdays these days require quite a bit more work than they used to as I often have to make allergy free substitutes for some of the things on the menu. Here is Joshua sniffing the gluten-(etc)free hot dog buns that just came out of the oven.
The last few years I have made my sister a special cake for her birthday. This started one year when she was complaining that no one ever makes her a pretty cake. Not that she didn't get cake mind you, just not the fancy variety. So, I offered to make her one for her present and so a new tradition was born. My mom thinks I'm a little wacko to agree to making two cakes on the same day :-)

This year I made chocolate clay and fondant roses for Jessie's cake. My beautiful little critters plopped down at the table and helped me make them. Can you tell which roses are theirs?

Joshua made the one that looks like and orchid and Brannon made the variegated one in the back. I think they did incredibly well!!

The rest of her cake looks kinda sad I think. I forgot to trim the layers so they would sit flat so the whole thing is lopsided, sigh... Brannon helped a lot with his cake this year. It's legos if you were having a bit of trouble with the interpretation. The chocolate things in front of Jessie's cake

are sculptures made by the boys when they got tired of making roses.

Playing with fire! After much deliberation Brannon decided he wanted to roast hot dogs for his birthday dinner. Grandpa built the fire and let them play with it for a bit before it was time to cook.

The birthday girl :)

I love this book :-) It's called Sky Boys: How They Built The Empire State Building. My fav part is, of course the black and white photos on the endpapers. The boys liked it too, they loved the drawings of men standing on beams and throwing things to one another.

The big present. Parents and Grandparents went in together on this big set for our lego fanatic.

We didn't get a picture but the other grandparents got a science-y game called Totally Gross, also right up his alley. Science is a close second after legos :)

Blowing out the candles.

This is my skinny mama holding Jessie's cake :-)

After the party a bunch of us went into town for the Christmas parade. I don't think anyone in the family had gone before. We had lots of fun. My favorite, as always was the marching bands. Brannon shrugged when I asked his favorite part. I think hanging out with his buddy was probably it more than the parade. They were so big(sniff, sniff) two tall eight-year-olds standing together by the road, behaving perfectly, chatting together and enjoying the parade... I think Joshies favorite part was probably the hot cider he got after the parade for the cold walk back to the cars (doubly cold cause we'd been standing still for 45 minutes).

Sunday morning (the actual birthday) found the boy deep in legos. Actually he woke up at 4:30 in the morning--that's excitement for ya. Yikes! I popped out at 5:00 and told him he could open his legos, then I went back to bed!

This is three hours later and Papa has emerged to lend a hand.

Do ya think he didn't want his picture taken??

Happy lego boy...

Poor dwarf!

We pried the boy away from his legos to go to church. Once back home he had to take a nap (Horrors!!) because he got up at 4:30. As soon as he woke up though it was back to business!

We surprised him with home-made pizza for dinner. Not dairy-free, but we use raw milk cheese which doesn't seem to give them a reaction.

Salad, mmmm...

Put down the legos to eat? Are you kidding?!

Yum!