Baptism

Tanner was baptized this Saturday. He is our oldest, so the first to get baptized, so it was a big deal at out house. He was really excited and understood how important and special this day was.

Here he is with his daddy all dressed in white.

Here is our little family.

With my parents.

With Kevins parents.

The gang.

Kevins brother Sterling and his family also came as well as our home teachers and several of Tanner's friends. After the baptism I asked Tanner if he was able to feel the Holy Ghost at all during his baptism. He said that he did. He said that he could feel a lot of peace and he knew that was the Holy Ghost. I was definetly a proud momma.

Afterwards we had the family over for Navajo Tacos, fruit, cupcakes and chocolate strawberries. Everything was yummy but I forgot to take pictures. O-well, it wasn't about the food.

Parents Visit

My parents came out to visit for Tanner's baptism. We tried to stay as busy as we could, but the weather was so crummy...They day they got here, we met them at the Thanksgiving Point Gardens. We have a season pass there and had not been to the Gardens yet. It was beautiful and the kids had a blast (we didn't even make it to the Childrens Gardens section).

After the Gardens we went over to Iceburg for some icecream. Sydney was so cute, she just loved the independence of using her own spoon.

The next day it was raining on and off all day, but during one of the rain breaks we made it to the local carnival.

Sydney had a great time on all the rides. It makes me very excited to take her to Disneyland

The boys on the Dragon, Noah looks very unsure about it, but I actually think he really liked it, because he keeps talking about it.

Tanner rode this very scary (to me) ride called the Fire Ball. I was scared just watching him ride it.

I was a good BIG brother and rode the little ride with his very happy sister.

Apparently my 8-year-old has not learned how to eat a carmel apple.

In Tanner's defence, Kevin just reminded me...We would not have a lot of success eating a carmel apple if we were missing our 2 front teeth.

Grand Canyon

We spent our Memorial Weekend at the Grand Canyon (well actually we went to St. George for a few days then went to the Grand Canyon for 2 days and back to St. George). The kids got to do some swimming at grandpa and grandmas pool and in all seriousness they probably would have loved to just do that all weekend, but we tore them away and spent Saturday and Sunday at the Grand Canyon. As we were driving there we passed a National Monurment (I totally forget the name, something Springs) since we have the parks pass it was free, so why not. Here are a few pictures from it. It was an old LDS tithing Farm, cool enough.

Here we are at the Grand Canyon Visitors Center. I know you can't really see us, but thats what you get when you ask some stranger to take your picture.

Look at these tired boys during a hike to Bright Angel Point.

Noah

They are very impressed with the views.

Sometimes he is not so serious.

The family.

Kev and his dad. Kev's parents came with us on this trip. The kids loved having grandma and grandpa with them.

The views were amazing and what a perfect model Tanner was.

Isaac and the canyon.

Even with this metal bars and chain link fencing, I was still pretty nervous (by prettynervous, I mean nightmares the night before and horrible visions of my children falling).

The boys.

So here are my thoughts on the Grand Canyon...I'm sure you want to know. It is a 6 hour drive from here to there. The views are certainly breathtaking. There are only a few shorter hikes (under 4 miles), which is where it lacked for me. With young kids we are definetly not hiking "rim to rim" or "rim to river" and back, so for 2 days there was a lot of down time. We could have covered it all in one long day, so for a 6 hour drive 1 day is not worth that drive, so if you decide to go I would recommend bringing some games to play in your cabin. There were some ladies chillin at the visitors center playing themselves some Mexican Train. Also if your kids are older (7 and up) they have mule rides you can do as well. They also have plane tour rides but that was a wee bit out of our budget.

At the North Rim there are not many places to stay. You can stay at the lodge right at the park (which was full, so not and option for us), Kaibab Lodge (this is where we stayed) which is 5 miles from the park, or Jacobs Lake, which is 30 miles from the park.

At the Kaibab Lodge we stayed in a little cabin with 2 double beds and a set of bunk beds. It was older and somewhat rustic (it had a shower and toilet and mice), but it was a nice little place to stay.

Will we go back...probably when the kids are older.

Family Pictures

Yesterday we went to get some family pictures done. We just went to JC Pennys, and they certainly are not my favorite, but...

Sydney was not all well behaved for the pictures so the whole time we are just trying to keep her just as happy as we can.

Sydney was due for her one year old pictures (yeah yeah, I know I'm a little late, call me a slacker).

You never would have known she was having a hard time by how sweet she looks here.

Tanner was due for his 8 year old pictures. He is always easy as far as taking pictures of him, however he is missing his 2 front teeth so he often smiles a little funny because he doesn't want to show them.

Pinewood Derby

Turning 8 has been a big deal for Tanner. First off, of course, he had the birthday party. But turning 8 also means cub scouts and this month for pack meeting it was the Pinewood Derby, let's just say he was pretty excited about that.

Here he was with his car. (In his brand new cub scout shirt that I had to mortgage the house just to pay for.)

Watching the cars race. We are by no means hard core Pine Wood Derbiers, but we did put a little time and effort into it because we wanted to make sure it at least made it down the track. He ended up in 5th place which we all felt perfectly fine with.

All the boys diplaying their cars so proudly.

Tanner won the award for most like a Corvette. (I remember when I was in cub scouts trying to think of award names for each of the cars, not always the funnest job).

So also with turning 8, Tanner gets to get baptized. I guess we save the best for last. That is scheduled for June 12th, so look forward to more pictures for that.

Harry Potter Party

So this year Tanner requested a Harry Potter party. I was so NOT excited about this theme. Although I had read the books, I am by no means a "hard core" fan. So lets just say it took me a little while before I really got into it, but when I did I will say I got carried away (even for me). So for all the mamas out there who need to plan the same party, here are some ideas.

So when the kids arrived, we headed to Diagon Alley to Madam Malikins and they were fitted with their very own Gryffindor robe. I had planned on only making a cape, but the robes actually took less fabric and only took a little more sewing time, so I sewed 12 robes. They each took me about 45 minutes, but they only cost me about $1.30 in fabric each. I also printed out a Gryffindor crest on iron-on paper for each robe.

Each kid also got some Harry Potter glasses. For these I purchased cheap disquises with the nose and mustache and I just cut off the unneeded parts, and they only cost 20 cents each. Then they got a lightening bolt tatoo for their foreheads.

Then it was off to Ollivander's for making wands. I bought black customizable pencils from Oriental Trading that said Ollivanders Wands on it. I had pipe cleaners that they could use to wrap around the wand. I popped out the erasers so the kids could put either a red pheonix feather or a dragon scale in it to power their wands, and we hot glued it in. As we were finishing up the kids were able to run around the yard and practice with their wands.

Look at this cute wizard. We called him Dumbledore.

Here is the birthday boy.

Look at all these future Gryffindor.

Platform 9 3/4

I bought plastic sheeting with brick print on it and taped it to the door and cut it up the center, so the kids could walk "through" the brick. The 9 3/4 sign was made with card stock and paint.


Inside we headed right to Hogwarts for classes.

Divination Class

I know they don't look perfect but these are suppose to be crystal balls. My sister so nicely pointed out that they would have looked better with clear ballons and this is true, but I had white balloons already so we did white. Inside each crystal ball was a fortune the kids one by one would pop the balloon and red their fortunes. I think all the kids really enjoyed this.

Next we did Charms Class. This did not go as well as I would have liked. I "taught" the kids 3 different charms. Expelliramus (disarms opponent), Ricktasempra (tickles your opponent) and Tarantellegra (forces your opponent to dance). Each kid had a chance to perform a charm of their choice on Headmaster Mommy.
Potions Class
Each kid was given a small cauldron (bought from oriental trading) to mix potions in. I also used some everyday stuff but them in containers and labeled them magical sounding names. Ex: Lemonade=Acid, Red Hots=Petrified Frog Hearts, Honey=Elder Tree Sap, Sprinkles=Brown Spider legs, etc.

We did 2 different potions. 1 was for Felix Felicious (Liquid Luck). I totally made this up using some of the above ingredients. I made sure to use ingredients that would actually taste alright so they could drink this one. The next was a pop rocks potion which I found online. This was pretty cool. Although other then the Pop Rocks crackling, I didn't notice much other change. Obviously the kids enjoyed this. All boys love to mix gross things together.

After a "hard day of classes" we headed over to Hogsmeade for some fun.

Honeydukes

At Honeydukes we played a game involving Bertie Botts Every Flavor Jelly Beans(which I bought at Toys R Us). They had to randomly pick a jelly bean (3/4 of them were disgusting flavors like boogers and vomit), if they could chew and swallow the jelly bean they scored a point. Some of those kids had no fear and ate everyone. Yuckity Yuck. This game, I think went very well. I gave each kid a little spit cup, just incase they didn't like their jelly bean.

I sent each kid home with a bag of jelly bellies (I bought a big thing of them at Sams Club and then put them in Bertie Botts bags that I bought really inexpensively on Ebay).

From Honeydukes they also got Chocolate Frogs. I bought my frog mold on Amazon.com. I had planned on just putting them in a little baggie with their wizard card, but then I had seen someone online made these cool boxes, so I had to do it too.

The wizard cards...I kind of lost my party planning steam by the time I got to these, I just ended up making them black and white and everyone got Dumbledore.

Quidditch

We played muggle Quidditch.

I made these broom stick (the broom part was from the dollar store and the handle was just a wooden dowle which I painted blackish brown and wrote either Nimbus 2000 or Fire Bolt on it). I also had yellow and red sashes for the the different teams so they could tell who was on their team.

Here are the goal posts. I had another set of these on the other side of the yard. I made these out of dollar store hula hoops. They had to throw the Quaffle (red playground ball) into one of the hoops to score 10 points.

So each team had one seeker (the one who finds the Snitch-I had a snitch key chain, which I hid in the yard, the one who found it got 50 points for there team), a keeper (the goalie), 2 chasers (the ones who score) and 2 beaters (the ones who throw the bludger).

If they got hit by a bludger (I had bought these small balls and painted them black, but apparently the paint didn't want to stick to the ball so it was a mess and I ended up just using some mini beach balls that we had at the house, they weren't black and that bothered me a bit, but the kids didn't seem to care), they had to drop the Quaffle.

I had to put this picture in because it is the only one of me dressed up as Headmaster Mommy.

If the kids would have listen to the rules a bit better I would have been happier about how this game turned out. Plus we had 2 kids get in a fight, serious poor sportsmanship going on. You would have thought Harry and Draco were having one of their "issues".

After Quidditch we headed over to the Leaky Cauldron for Butterbeer (cream soda, butterscotch syrup and vanilla ice cream), cake and ice cream.

The Cake
I had a hard time deciding what to do for a cake. Not because there are a lot of ideas out there for Harry Potter cakes, but because in my opinion I just didn't like any of them except the really cool ones that were so not a possibility for me. So I decided on Hogwarts and still was nervous that it would just look like a castle and not Hogwarts. I printed off on cardstock some House flags and the Hogwarts crest just so people knew. I baked 2- 10 inch and 2- 8 inch square cakes for the body of the castle and Wiltons Romantic castle set for the turrets. I wrapped the whole thing in marshmellow fondant (which I made myself). It was a lot of work and took me about half a day to make.

Here is Tanner blowing out his candles.

We ended the party with present opening and goody bags. For the goody bags, I just used black colored paper bags which were filled with more lightening bolt tattoos, Bertie Botts, Chocolate frogs plus my mother-in-law had given us a truck load of Harry Potter stuff she had been "collecting". So the kids got to pick from bookmarks, coloring books and bumper stickers. Plus they got to take their robes and brooms.

It was a fun party, but I am glad I don't have another birthday till November.