The happenings around here

School is almost out, so I had better get a blog post up before summer hits and I spend all my days driving my kids around. Why did nobody tell me before I had school aged kids that planning out their summers is practically a full time job? It's not that I think they are overscheduled, it's just that with a different thing going on every week, I have to figure when to fit everything in and still have some time to play and go to the pool and whatnot. I think it'll be fun, but I know I will be relieved when it is over.

Anyway. Here's what is going on around here.

• Garage sale season is in full swing. After several disappointing outings, I found some really good stuff last weekend.
• After driving past it on the way to church every Sunday for nearly four years, we finally got a membership to our local living history museum. We actually got a coupon in the mail for free balloon tickets with purchase of a membership, only by the time we got there the wind had kicked up & they cancelled the ride. But they gave us rain checks so I guess we will have to go back another time!
• I'm keeping really busy (but having fun) making stuff for my Etsy.
• I've been kind of obsessed with The Dodos lately, especially this song.
• Speaking of obsessed, Amy gets really mad if we don't let her wear a dress. She is all about the baby dolls lately, but they have to be naked. She's also figured out how to jump, which is really funny since she barely clears the ground.
• Betsy keeps telling me she is going to be an author when she grows up. She loves to write little stories and then illustrate them. She is really loving first grade (they hatched baby chicks!) and she's been doing well with her spelling. Betsy is all about compound words right now. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining to her when a word isn't.
• And Porter is almost done with preschool. I took him to the kindergarten orientation at his school last week... I needn't have bothered, he already knows his way around the building and has been riding a bus for the last two years. I think he's really ready, since he's already reading and everything. Plus, in kindergarten they do a unit about dinosaurs.
• Oh yeah, we booked our next vacation to Disneyworld. We'll be going at the end of October when the kids are on fall break. Woo hoo! By then it will have been more than three years since our last visit, which I think is a decent interval. The kids are getting hyped up for it already.
• Betsy's dance recital is this Saturday. Be watching this space, I'll post video. She likes to put on her costume (it's purple) and practice the dance, so I can verify that it is, in fact, wicked adorable.

Five

Get a load of this handsome guy:

Porter's birthday was actually a week ago, but since I am both a bad mother and a neglectful blogger, I'm writing about it now. Actually, Porter was a lucky boy because he managed to get three or four days' worth of enjoyment out of his birthday!

Because of Matt's work schedule (which changes every five minutes it seems like) he wasn't going to be around at night on Porter's big day. So on Saturday we went to Chuck E Cheese for an exciting lunch of pizza and arcade games. My kids really love Chuck E Cheese, and I love getting the coupons for it out of the newspaper. I forgot to bring the camera so there aren't any pictures, but it was really cute. We also got Mike and cousin Miles to meet us up there because they are fans of the cheese-eating rodent as well. Watching my two-year-old nephew own his daddy at air hockey was really, really amusing.

Sunday we had church, and then the Official Birthday Celebration. We invited Mike, Mandy, and Miles over because (as it turns out) Miles is a fan of cupcakes too. Porter's birthday dinner was hotdogs. Actually, the meal planning conversation went like this:

ME: Porter, what do you want for your birthday dinner?

PORTER: Hot dogs or pizza.

ME: Well, we are going to Chuck E Cheese and we'll have pizza for lunch, so how about hot dogs for dinner?

PORTER: Okay.

ME: What do you want to have with it?

PORTER: How about... some water for drinking.

ME: [is relieved to have a low maintenance child]

PORTER [a few minutes later]: Mom, make sure the water is not from a pond.

ME: Okay.

PORTER: Or from a pool.

ME: I promise we will get it from the fridge.

So Porter had his birthday dinner of hot dogs and some water for drinking (but not from a pond or a pool). Actually he had apple juice to drink, and some delicious Ore Ida fries, and cupcakes with yellow frosting (had to be yellow because that's a boy color according to my kids) for dessert.

Because Porter is a boy (in case you hadn't gotten that by now) it's pretty easy to buy him gifts. We gave him a couple of dinosaur-themed Imaginext sets (Imaginext are these toy sets that Fisher Price makes and P has a bunch of them already. They are very, very boy) and Grandma Lynn and cousin Miles both gave him Legos. Not the big Duplo blocks, mind you, but tiny Legos (that's what he calls them). He's been telling us for ages that when he's five, he can play with tiny Legos. Well, guess who is five now!