St. Patrick's Day

We love celebrating St. Patrick's Day at our house. A couple weeks ago we made and frosted shamrock cookies and made shamrocks to hang by our fireplace.

For family home evening this past Monday we had some friends over for a lesson and then to build leprechaun traps and have Sprite and lime sherbet floats. These have now become Zach's favorite treat. I didn't get a chance to take pictures at this activity.

Yesterday I made the boys some leprechaun hats and beards and we had a gold hunt in the backyard. Caleb's and Zach's faces in the first picture show well how each felt about the costume idea. That beard and hat came off Caleb as fast as possible. They both loved getting to be leprechauns and finding the Rolos and plastic gold in the backyard.

It was a bit windy which didn't work so well with the beard...

This morning the boys woke up to find that in spite of their efforts to trap the leprechauns, those sneaky little guys got up to their usual St. Patrick's Day mischief.

Our pictures were decorated

Footprints were left to show how our cleverly designed traps failed to do their job

The chairs in the kitchen and dining room were tipped over. Zach was especially impressed that one chair ended up on the table. Those little leprechauns are strong for their size.

The milk was turned green:

At least the leprechauns seemed to have had a hole in their gold bag and left chocolate gold at the scenes of their crimes. The boys loved getting to eat chocolate before breakfast.

Caleb was a little slower to get into gathering up the gold we made Zach leave for him. It didn't help that when he was dazed and still waking up Zach kept running up to tell him more about what the leprechauns had done and shoving chocolate into his hands. In the picture below, Caleb is modeling the stickers the leprechauns put on the boys while they were sleeping. The thoughtful little guys wanted to make sure the boys weren't in danger of getting pinched due to the lack of green on their pjs.

A nice display of the gold Caleb gathered...

After exploring and eating chocolate, Zach decided that St. Patrick's Day would not be complete without showing some Irish heritage pride and posting our little flags in the front yard.

Breakfast highlights included the green milk and cinnamon rolls with the icing dyed green. I'd bought Lucky Charms for the occasion but forgot about them until about lunchtime. Oh well.

Since St. Patrick's Day happened to fall on Sunday this year and Zach was in need of a new church shirt, the boys got new green dress shirts to wear for the occasion. These will also double for Easter clothes. Happy St. Patrick's day everyone!

Visit from the Sharps Part 2 - Beach and Halloween Cupcakes

The day after going to Dewberry farm we had planned on taking it easy. Instead we made a spontaneous trip to the beach. All the boys LOVED the beach and we had some good times building sandcastles, dumping water on the sandcastles (Caleb and Melissa's oldest especially), running in the waves, and chasing seagulls. Zach started feeling pretty sick part way through so that was our cue to head home. 

A big damper on the trip was having a piece of tire come flipping across the highway while driving home. I wasn't able to dodge it so it punched a big hole in the bumper of our new van that we have only owned for about 2 1/2 weeks. (A couple of weeks and little over $700 later it looks good as new again.)

We also managed to squeeze decorating Halloween cupcakes into the visit. Here are the results:

Halloween Crafts

I've been having fun creating things to decorate our apartment for Halloween. With a small budget I've had to try and get creative. Here are some of my creations so far:

For this shelf we used stuff we already had and added the Halloween tree/bush I made this year. I got the idea for it from a blog called Sutton Grace. I painted a pot from a dead plant we had and ended up only paying a couple of bucks for black spray paint I can also use on other projects. The branches are left over from a floral design class and I used dry white beans in the pot to keep the branches in place. The ornaments are made using colored paper and thread.


A few days after the top picture was taken my sister came over and we each made a pumpkin felt creature. All we needed was felt, pipe cleaners, thread, and a couple of beads we already had. We got the idea from this link. We used shredded paper instead of the excelsior wood shavings.


We bought the welcome sign from the dollar store last year. The bat is just made from pieces of felt that I cut out.


The "trick of treat" banner below is based off of the same blog post on Sutton Grace as the Halloween tree. Instead of canvas and freezer paper I used felt again. I decided to change the triangles into tombstone shapes and tie the pieces together with small pieces of string. I like how leaving the ends from the knots there's a barbed wire or vertebrae look. It seems more Halloween-like to me :).


For this pumpkin canister I just painted an empty formula container and added some fake leaves and branches I had left over from a floral design class. I did buy some orange paint, though not with this project in mind.


Total cost of decorating this year was about $6 for some paint and a couple sheets of felt.

Some June Catch Up

Swim Trip

On June 13th we took Zach to the Lafayette Rec Center. Before we went swimming Zach had fun playing with Derrick's swimsuit.


Fun times at the pool.


Bundled up and on our way home.

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Pedicures

My brother Garrett watched Zach so my mom and I could go get pedicures :).

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Fathers' Day

This last Fathers' Day was Derrick's first as a father. He's risen to the challenge wonderfully and is an amazing Dad for Zach. I love seeing the two of them interacting and playing together. Zach is one lucky kid. I also have to give a quick shout out to my dad and father-in-law. They're the best a girl could ask for!


As part of the celebration we made my family's traditional fancy meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade rolls, and other good stuff. This is a picture before most of the food made it to the table.


Zach had fun getting messy though I'm not so sure what inspired this facial expression...


Playing around with his hippo and with Grandpa Jones:

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Visit with Mom Bowen and Tyson

Derrick's mom and brother Tyson passed through the area near the end of June on their way from Grand Junction to Baltimore where Tyson will be starting at John's Hopkins. We met at a park in Golden, watched Zach play, and got lunch before they continued their long road trip. Zach wasn't too interested in getting his picture taken. Here he is trying to run away.

Valentine Fun

So one thing about having a blog is that it gives Derrick and I more motivation to take pictures and document the things we do. They're definitely fun for us to look back on! We had a really fun day yesterday. I woke up early and for the first time made Derrick a hot breakfast before work. Usually I just wake up in time to have some cold cereal with him but this morning we had homemade waffles. The waffle iron we got for our wedding works great!

It was nice for me that Derrick didn't really have class (I think it was just a help session) so we had the whole day to spend together from noon on. One thing that we noticed when we were starting to date is that we have so much fun together no matter what we're up to. Lately, I've really wanted to get or make curtains for our apartment because the big window in our front room just has some really ugly blinds. In order to justify spending the money on the curtain project, we decided that they could be a Valentine's day present Derrick could give me. (Romantic huh?...right). Last night we went to Wal-mart to get the materials to make curtains for our apartment. Once I get around to making them we'll have to let you know how that adventure goes.

While at Wal-mart, Derrick passed by the strawberries and they smelled so strong that he couldn't resist getting some. They're definitely a favorite of his. He also got some Martinelli's to go them. Back at our apartment we were able to pull out our fondue set for the first time since we got it and try our luck with chocolate dipped strawberries. We weren't sure how well it'd work but it worked great and we had a lot of fun. I guess part of the excitement had something to do with having fancy little sticks to use.

Valentine Fun Pics