Claire Bear's 4 Year Old Rainbow Party

Happy Birthday Claire Bear!

It has been 4 wonderful years!

   Claire has talked about her birthday for months now and every time she requested a rainbow party. 

I kept asking her if she wanted a princess party because that is her thing but she always refused. So a  

RAINBOW PARTY! it is.

 My birthday girl was excited to have this balloon in the morning. 

She awoke to a rainbow decorated kitchen. 

Here is the cute invitations we sent out.

We decorated our little nook to look like a rainbow with clouds.

She requested a rainbow cake but I had my doubts about trying to do a huge layered cake so i decided to do cupcakes in glass containers so you could see the colors. I used this recipe for the cake batter and it was delicious. I did a regular butter cream frosting but substituted out a little vanilla with a little almond extract.

We decorated the door to welcome our guests and put together favor bags for the kids with rainbow skittles, rainbow airhead strips, rainbow suckers, a rainbow Mentos pack, a rainbow crayon, and a rainbow notepad.

Ava even drew and requested to display a special piece of art dedicated to Claire for her rainbow party. I love her family portraits!

Claire was so excited to open presents but then when everyone is sitting around and watching her, she gets so shy. She loved everything and said "This is what I always wanted" after just about every gift.

We sang happy birthday to her and she got shy again. She loves her birthday but has a love/hate relationship with being the center of attention.

We both have such a great family that came out to support her and she definitely felt their love!
Later that night she asked when it was going to be her birthday again and was kind of disappointed by the answer. She already has a new theme in mind.  Looks like she really is my mini me. 

 One last funny thing that happened that night was this:

My blue dye gel was a little thicker and harder to mix completely.  I had noticed one hunk that didn't dissolve when I was making the cupcakes and had fished it out. I guess there was another one that I missed. My mom's whole mouth turned blue...teeth and all. We all giggled so hard that we cried and everyone was snapping pictures. She said it wore off the next day but we were a little worried. Thank heavens it didn't happen to anyone else and that it happened to my mother and not Tyson's. 

My mom can remove her teeth to clean them! :) 

What a good way to brighten the end of one of the most dreary months!

Happy Birthday Crazy Cousin Claire! 

January 2014 {A New Year and a New Semester of School}

January began with us celebrating New Year's Eve a day late on New Year's Day.

Our kids are little and don't know any better so we decided to postpone our festivities for a night because I had one last paper to submit. We celebrated the New Year with the Ramsey's who are our great friends and neighbors. We had appetizers and made fun cotton candy flavors with our new cotton candy machine that we got for Christmas.  We had fun, but of course didn't stay up too late since all the kiddos were pretty young.

I took a week off of school work to kind of recoup and then had to dive back in. But we decided to make some time for some fun too.

Poor Talmage, always the guinea pig with his sisters. Or should I say baby Moses in a basket.

Talmage also started making some headway in the walking department. He has stood for along time and would even take some steps while holding furniture, but he wouldn't pull himself up to standing on a regular basis. We found him up in bed a few times but now he is finally doing it regularly. Our hardwood floors make it slippery, but he finally is finding his footing.

Our little man has been becoming Mr Independent. Wanting to feed himself with utensils and hold his own big drinks.

Ava had five weeks of ski lessons and is quite the little skier now. Tyson also took her up for some night skiing sessions. One night he even braved it and took both girls.

 

Little Miss decided to give herself a pink make over.

We re-enact the movie Frozen and have full on singing sessions almost every day.

That is why we had to take a little trip to Midway with our cousins to see the Ice Castles. We had fun singing and re-enacting the song- "Let it go". Hope everyone around enjoyed it to!

Of course we had to get something to eat later at Don Padros which is our favorite Mexican Restaurant in Heber.

One Saturday as Tyson and I were changing Ava's sheets we found this under her pillow.  

Oh no!

And so it begins...

We attempted to go see the ice castles again with our friends the Ramsey's but it was the weekend of the Sundance Film Festival and it was cold and crowded. We scrapped the ice castles and headed to Provo to eat at Bajio and hang out at the Riverwoods. Ava R. said her infamous words "I'm tired" and then promptly fell asleep at the table. We all had a good laugh because she does it almost every time. I wish we had a good sleeper like that!

We ended the month by celebrating Claire's 4th birthday which I will detail in the next post.
To be continued...