Strapping at Seven

One morning this week, Josiah woke me up to say he was going to bring my coffee up to me.  I (quickly) went downstairs with him to find he had pushed the brew button on the coffee machine, poured me a cup, and had poured creamer in the mug as well.  (It was sweeeet.)  Then he presented me with burnt toast "because you like it burnt, Mommy."  He said he wanted to do that for me every day.
"Can I get, 'Motivations for How to Get Up Earlier in the Morning,' for $200 Alex?"
He has really been wanting to help out more in the kitchen, though.  It's a good thing.  A good thing that requires a fair amount of patience for such enthusiasm.

Our boy, Henry turned seven this week!  Seven.  Many, many months ago he asked us to hide his birthday presents.  He didn't forget that and so we hid all his gifts - the three from us and the boxes from his grandparents and cousins.  His card held the first clue that sent him to his first gift, which held the clue to the second gift.  He had fun doing it, even with an overly enthusiastic brother trying to take the lead.  Henry was super generous with his siblings - letting them each open one of his gifts.  Later, he let Josiah build a lot of his big Lego kit.


The rest of the day seemed like an eating expedition.  We started off with donuts for breakfast.

We were at CC for the morning, and even ate lunch there, but Henry didn't want to miss out on the opportunity for eating at a restaurant for his birthday lunch, so after CC we went to Which Wich for sandwiches.  Henry asked for a milkshake there since Josiah got a milkshake on his birthday.

How Henry filled out his sandwich bag.

Then we went out to dinner for hamburgers, and finally home for cake.  That night, I'm not so sure we went to sleep per se, but more like we drifted off into food comas.

He requested a football cake and he was not disappointed.  Although, he did think that the football on top was a real football cut in half.  That was a little disappointing to see that it was a flimsy piece of plastic.  People requested their cake slices based on the side yardlines.  "I want the 50 yard line."

Henry got a football game from his cousins and he has loved it.  For the first few days he didn't play it according to the rules, because he said he already knew how to play.  He literally pushed the football down the field with his fingers and if it rolled off the table, then it was the next person's turn.  Todd read the directions this weekend and they finally played for real.  He loves that it comes with every team in the NFL with their names and helmets to put in the end zones.  In his excitement he wrote out every team in the NFL.  And, yes, we did count that as handwriting practice.  :)

One of our gifts for Henry was a football, and he was thrilled to get it.  But we quickly realized that giving Henry a hard rubber football was not the wisest of present choices because we don't want him to throw it inside.  We currently have a Nerf football in our amazon cart.

We have played countless games of Guess Who?  Caroline has enjoyed it as much as the rest of us, but instead of asking distinguishing physical features of the people, she asks, "Does your person start with the letter A?"  It makes it a much longer game (because she requires all players to only ask about letters), but it works.

And speaking of letters.  The boys spelled this out.  Todd and I both said, "At least they spelled everything correctly."

Josiah has been asking to do pastels again.  They tend to be incredibly messy, so I told him he had to do them outside if he was to do them.  And they're still incredibly messy.  He had to take a bath after doing them - the dust literally went all the way up his arm.  His picture turned out well though - it's Kylo Ren from Star Wars.  He says it's the "force" surrounding him.

I had the kids go through all of their artwork because it was busting out of their containers.  The boys didn't want to throw anything away, so they made room in their containers by hanging a ton of pictures up on their bedroom wall.  It looks a bit schizophrenic at first glance, but there really is an order to it all.  And after seeing it much of the week, we've been quite curious just how they got some of the pictures hung up as high and as far away from the bed.  "We just stretched out from top bunk."  Hmmm.

We finished out the weekend by doing our annual Caring for Katy with our church.  It's the day the church doesn't have a service, but we all go out into the community doing service projects.  Our group went back to the same trailer park that we were at last year.  They have a Kidz Club there that helps the kids with homework/tutoring, provides snacks, etc.  It was raining all day, so our entire group was inside this trailer - painting walls, organizing their library, creating a doorway, moving and organizing all their shelves.  Todd helped with the manual labor, while the kids and I helped bag animal crackers.  We did 16 crackers to one small Ziploc, 25 small Ziploc bags into one giant Ziploc.  You know what I heard the entire time we bagged them?  "Can I have some?  I want some."

Then our kids discovered the food brought by some of our group - kolaches, donuts, cookies.  Josiah and Caroline helped themselves quite a bit.  After sorting animal crackers, we went through all of the games to make sure they had all of their pieces.  We were there for 3.5 hours, so after some time the kids were getting a little crazy (not to mention it was the kids who were eating all the donuts), so one lady wisely had all the kids color at a table and they were not allowed to leave that area if they were 3rd grade and younger.  It worked.  They all colored very nicely while the other projects could finish up.  Caroline left saying she had made two new friends.


For birthday season, we are two down and one to go.