Trip to Colorado

So, I finally have some pictures from our trip to Colorado. Serves me right for not taking my own camera and my own pictures, oh well.
We had so much fun being up there. Me and the 3 girls flew up jsut after Memorial day and got to spend 2 weeks, it was a lot colder than here, but it was pretty nice still. The big girls had such a blast playing outside with with their cousins, and the trampoline and playground were quite the novelty.

For dinner one of the first nites there we cooked some hot dogs outside and roasted marshmallows. I think Tristan only liked the watermelon and marshmallows... oh well. It was so cute to see her stuff her face with them!

Oh yeah, for those that are keeping track of the pregnancy... I was approximately 29 weeks when I was up there... the sweatshirt hides a lot.

Ah, Madison and Brooklyne, they are jsut so much fun! They love to roast "smarshmallows" as they call them. But of course they don't like them browned, so they just hold them WAY above the fire! Sweet.

Are you dying for some Z-fun?

Alright, so it's been awhile, cut me some slack, I'm large and miserably pregnant... geez.

Anyway, on with the good stuff: I took a trip to Colorado, of which I have no pictures from, still waiting on some of those, so I'll post them when I get them. As well, my dad made an unexpected visit over July 4th weekend. I love that somehow my parents can still manage to "pop in" on us, and they live over 1,000 miles away... only MY parents! It was awesome though, the little girls didn't know that Grandpa was coming so when they went to answer the door, they squealed with delight. Little Tristan got excited and then immediately asked where Grandma was. Everytime she same Grandpa for the whole weekend, she would ask where "mama" was. So cute!

Okay, and then something I actually have pictures of... TJ's birthday bash. It was some good times had by all. I want to preface the picture parade with a big thanks to everyone who celebrated with us, we (and most importantly TJ) had a really great time!

I loved getting ready for this party, I just wish that I felt a little better, it would have been easier. But it was so cute, with every new decoration item I pulled out, he got a little bit more of a smile on his face, like I ACTUALLY went out of my way to make this a party for him. Which is unusual for me, because he thinks that I'm a slacker about everything! So at the end of the nite, he ws thrilled to know that he had great friends to spend his birthday with, and people that cared enough about him to come and celebrate with him. Thanks!

The big one

Here are my proudest details from the party... I didn't really get any pictures of the ACTUAL party... since you, know I have a few kids I have to chase after, feed, prepare food, blah, blah blah, you know, all that playing hostestt stuff. Alright, maybe it's a an excuse, but isn't it a good one?



For starters, the invites. Really and truly invites are my most favorite part. Even though I know that everybody throws them away, and I often wonder why I should waste my time or efforts on such a piece of paper that will shortly be disposed of... I just can't help it. It's the thing that sets the modd and tone of the party. I thought I was rather clever with this one (nothing like giving myself a big pat on the back, eh? !!)

Some little party favors for the adults to take home, since I made others for the kdis to have. The buckets were filled with salt water taffy. Seriously, no candy says summer-time like salt water taffy! Yum. I think I may have picked out all the cinnamon ones before filling the buckets, they are my all time favorite!

The party favors for the kids, or anybody else that wanted one. I made my dearest friends save me their toilet paper rolls for weeks (cool, huh?). In my head it was such a clever idea. When implementation and construction finally began on them, I was thinking the idea was far less than clever, hovering around stupid. But in the end, I did manage to finish them, and well, as dorky as they may have been, they were still a better idea that these next things:

The treats. Well, the treats were a fine idea. I even had a lot of fun making them.... ready for the "problem".... One should never be suckered into buying a start-shaped cupcake mold that only has 6 cups in it. Because makign 6 star cupcakes at a time is not really that fun. Cool in the end, maybe, cool changing them out every 11 minutes... not really. But the girls and I rose to the task and got them done, yeah for us! Next item of "not-so-coolness" was these here star shaped rice krispies. Super easy to make, relatively easy to cut out, using a standard cookie cutter. And they were quite easy to dip in the white chocolate and decorate. But, well, you'll see what happens (down at the bottom) when they are skewered and put out in the Texas heat....

Just some more details of the party decoration preparations.

The whole banner, so nobody would forget that this was the big number!

The cake shot, gone wonky. I never know how to shoot candle shots very well... I hate to use a flash and have them look like the regular room and all "flashy" but then using no flash gets too dark.. dilemmas. This one ended up all tinged red from the candle light (weird). So, whatever, I thought this was cool-ish. I was hoping the candles would have had more of a "sparkler" effect in the photo, but you can't really see how it was spewing sparks everywhere. I loved the packaging it said to extinguish place in water. Sweet-- not a fire hazard at all!!

The awesome gifts

He got a sweet apron from some friends. It says
"TJ's House of Meats
smoke 'em
if you got 'em"

Now this folks is the face of true happiness and surprise, which is not often found on TJ's face. These folks did more than a fantastic job picking a gift, it's like they couldn't have known TJ any better! Thanks guys!

The sweet John Lennon book was also accompanied by this here roll of t.p. which was accompanied by a quite hilarious note, it read:
Birthdays come and birthdays go
and I hope that yours is happy!

But you really need to be prepared,
in case it turns out crappy.

So here's a special gift from me
to help you make it through the day.

If it isn't everything you wished,
just flush your blues away!

And lastly folks, this is what happens to a *geniue* idea gone bad at the end of the nite... nope, about 15 minutes after placement. So, to save many of you some heart-ache and grief, don't even bother thinking that rice krispies are going to stay on a skewer any longer when it's 1,000 degrees out. Maybe if the whole thing were coated in chocolate it would have held together. As it was, the marshmallow got warm and started to stretch, causing some mayhem on it's way down! Oh well, the firts picture looked great!