Kindergarten Celebration

This was my last kindergarten mother's day breakfast at school. They sang a cute song and served all the moms muffins and juice.

Eight is Great!

Ellie requested a visit to the Rain Forest Cafe for her 8th birthday, where we got a volcano cake to share. It was much bigger than we expected - we had a bunch of leftovers to take home. She also got a new bike and helmet.

All Dressed Up and Someplace to Go

Maddie and her best friend Victoria, on their way into the 8th Grade dance. This is the only dance their Junior High has, to celebrate the end of their time there. All of the girls were dressed up for the dance, while most of the boys were wearing jeans and button down shirts, with a few in khakis, so the group pictures were pretty funny.

Earlier that day . . .

The morning of the 8th grade dance, Maddie was giving it her all on her soccer team.

Clydesdale

Ellie loves horses, even when they're shills for beer companies. (Sea World is owned by Anheuser Busch.)

Four D

We took our first trip of the season to Sea World, to see Ben's school choir perform there. It turned out to be quite cold, so we spend most of the day watching shows (carefully out of the splash zone). They had a new 4D movie about pirates this year - you get sprayed with a water a few times, but not enough to get soaked.

Hazards of Spaghetti

I'm not sure when my cooking became a safety hazard, but Sammy felt he needed these goggles to eat dinner.

Happy Birthday Dave

Dave and his homemade birthday cake - this was number 42 for him. We decided not to light a bonfire on top of the cake and just went with Happy Birthday Candles.

Buddies

These are just various pictures from Ben's party that I thought were cute.

Maddie and Jonathon, one of Ben's best friends and our neighbor.

Sarah and Sammy

Jamie (little sister of Ben's friend Jordan) and Sammy

More than a decade . . .

Mr. Ben turned 11 this year. He helped me decorate his cake - I've suddenly got a cake making bug that I can't explain - I usually don't even hesitate to order one from the store.

We had his party at a gaming place. They have multiple big screen TVs, pleather couches and every gaming system and game known to man. Ben and his buddies spend two hours like little zombies, playing video games. They did take a few moments to eat pizza and cake at the end, but wouldn't even take time to open presents, because they could game for a few more minutes at the end of party.

Chef Ellie

Ellie made dinner for everyone - Hidden Hotdogs. She's always asking me if she could start cooking stuff, so we dug out a kid's cookbook we had and got started. They turned out very well - we're looking forward to her future creations.

Three Musketeers

Maddie's friend Sarah came down from Dallas to stay with us for Spring Break. She's such a sweetheart - we love having her at our house.

Salesgirl

Ellie's had several cookies sales for Brownies in front of the grocery store by our house. On this night, her group of girls sold 71 boxes. I bought 7 of them, because we'd already eaten all the cookies from the regular sale. The Lemonades are absolutely addictive.

We are the (second place) Champions

Ben's basketball team, the Panthers, won second place in the post-season tournament. They played good games and we had lots of fun watching. Dave enjoyed being the coach - he's always really good with kids that way. The boys were very happy, because they got trophies. In this league, only first and second place teams get trophies at the end of the season.

Duh duh, duh duh, duh duh . . .

That's the theme from Jaws, by the way.

Ben wanted to make a shark cake this year for the annual Cub Scout Blue and Gold dinner. I thought about how to make this cake in the background of my mind for at least a week. On Monday night (the night before the dinner) I had a dream of how we should make the cake. I got at 5am and made a trip to the grocery store, where I purchased: Red Velvet cake mix, two tubs of white frosting, small tubs of decorative frosting in black, red and white, and a box of Goldfish crackers. Then I baked the Red Velvet cake in a 9x12 pan, put it in the freezer and got everyone off to school, and headed for work.
That afternoon, Ben and I found an appropriate shark outline on the internet and cut out the shape from the sheet cake. We also mixed the decorative black frosting in to the white, to make grey. It turned out to be harder than we expected to frost this thing - crumbs were going everywhere. I was on the phone with Jenny, and she suggested pouring thinned down frosting over the whole thing first. We did this, popped it back into the freezer for a while and were able to finish the coat of grey. Ben added the gill lines, eye, mouth, and some streaks of red blood falling from the shark's mouth. Then the goldfish crackers. The base is a white plastic cutting board covered with blue cellophane.
Here's Ben with the finished product - the cake turned out really good almost all of it was eaten at the party.