Lily & Ares' 3rd Birthday Party!

We celebrated Lily & her cousin Ares' third Birthday on Saturday.
Ares turned 3 on Sunday, but Lily won't turn 3 until next Sunday.

Here is my Birthday Princess:

And here are the Birthday kids:

We had a Princess/Dragon theme.

The girls all got tiaras and the boys all got crowns.

We even had color your own shields!!

My sister Mary made Lily's cake.

Are you seeing a pattern where I don't make my kid's cakes...

and why would I when I have a sister who can do this:

She made a beautiful princess castle....

complete with Lily's very own princess cake.

TOO CUTE!!

My niece Karen (Ares' aunt) made this cute dragon cake for him.

Super job Karen!! You are such a great aunt!

After a yummy lunch, the kids sat down to open their presents.

Lily got lots of cute clothes, shoes, princess things, My Little Ponies......

and Ares got lots of dragons, art supplies, bubbles, etc.

I think they both took in a pretty good haul. ;-)

Then it was time to sing Happy Birthday and eat cake!

Lily enjoyed eating her own personal cake.

Well, actually she basically just ate the icing, but hey, it was her party. =)

Thanks Ares for sharing your Birthday with Lily again this year!!

Lily had a lot of fun with you!!

Happy Father's Day!

I asked the kids to tell me one word to describe their Dad.

Here's what they said:

Zach: Awesome!

Riley: Nice!

Lily: Happy!

(This was really hard for Lily...she kept wanting to say he was pink.) =)

Happy Father's Day to the most awesome, nice, and happy Daddy in the world!

We love you Jeff!!

Happy Father's Day too, to my Dad.

Thanks for being a great Dad & wonderful Granddad!!

# 3: Water Balloons

Number 3 on our summer list is water balloons.
Water balloon fights are more fun with lots of kids.
Not just Zach & Riley.
Right? ;0)
On Wednesday, I was watching 5 of my nephews.
I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to fill up our balloons.

We filled up over 80 water balloons!
It took Riley and I about 30 minutes to fill up this laundry basket.......

.....and it took about 5 minutes for the all of the balloons to pop. :)

But they had fun in those five minutes!!

The two youngest weren't as crazy about this idea as the older ones.

Lily would have NOTHING to do with it.

Poor Camden got hit once, gave the person a dirty look, and decided he did NOT like this game.

But the older boys had a lot of fun!

Thanks Cooper, Carson, Camden, Cody, and Kael for coming over to help us check off one more thing on our summer to do list!!

Things Lily Says

Lily thinks things are called one thing, while they are actually called another.
Her version of things are pretty cute though, so I thought I would share some:

Cheetos are "Pacheetos"
(a combination of potato chips and Cheetos)
Fountains are "Squirters"
Splinters are "Bones"
(she asked me to get the bone out of her foot. It took me forever to figure out what she actually wanted.)
Shivering is "Shimmering"
Elevators are "Alligators"



Lily actually dressed up like this.
She took her clothes off and was running around in her underwear.
Then she thought it would be a good idea to put her rain boots on....
Silly Girl! ;0)

# 6: Art Projects

This is one of the things we will be doing a lot of this summer.
My kids LOVE to do art projects.
They love for me to have an organized project,
and they love to do things on their own.
The art project that I decided to post was making masks.
The kids did such a good job!!
First they all decided on what kind of animal they wanted.
Then they decided what color paint they wanted for it's face.
We used paper plates, construction paper, glitter, pipe cleaners, and paint.

Zach quickly decided on a fish, using purple; his favorite color.
Riley chose blue, of course, and then decided on a dragon.
(After he decided that a blue lion would be silly.)
Lily wanted pink.
She didn't care what animal it was, as long as it was pink.
The boys shouted out lots of animals, until Lily finally settled on an elephant.
(I told her elephants were gray, but she didn't care.) =)

Here are their finished masks!!

Even though we checked art projects off of our list, we will be doing LOTS more throughout the summer!

Farmer Zach

Zach's new favorite thing to do at Grammy & Granddad's house:

He thinks he's pretty hot stuff.

# 15: Play Card Games

All five of us sat down to play Go Fish and Snap!
The kids' favorite part of Snap was yelling out Snap.
Lily just started yelling it out until she happened to be right. ;-)

The boys are really good at Go Fish.

Lily liked it too and with Jeff's help, she understood the concept pretty quickly.

I am sure we will have many more card games this summer (and beyond),

I just won't be taking pictures of all of those. =)