Soccer Stars

Our two little pumpkins had their first soccer game Monday night.
This is Dylan's second year to play and London first. And not only is this her first year to play soccer, but its her first ever team sport to play. 

I wasn't sure what to expect from Londy Lou. She is a year younger than the minimum age to play, but since her Daddy was willing to coach, the league let her play up a year. She was at least a full year younger than all the other kids on the field and two year younger than some. She totally held her own though. I could tell  by the end of the game that she was starting to loose stamina and interest, but she did her best to stay with it. We were so proud of her.

 

 I love this picture of London and Dylan cheering on the team during a water break. 

 

Look at the picture below and see if you can figure who is coaching who here.
 

What I love about this picture is that she is on the field actually "playing" in the game. She looked up and noticed me taking pictures and gave me a nice little pose. Sassy Pants. I love her.
 

After London's game, we walked across to the big fields for our big man to play.
He was so excited to play goalie and he did a great job!
He blocked both the goals that were shot at him.
Turns out our team was pretty great at offence, which is awesome, but made for very little goalie action.
So he was excited to get to switch to offense in the second half of the game. He tried so, so hard and came close to a goal several time with no luck. I kept telling him "don't give up" (and I may have bribed him just a little). He stuck with it and at the very end of the game he scored a goal!
 

 

I love sitting on the sidelines and cheering these two little ones on.
I hope they always know that I'm their biggest fan, on and off the fields. 

Flag Football

My handsome little man is playing flag football this year.
He has been waiting to be old enough for football for years now.
Saturday was his first game and he did a great job.
He even scored a touch down!!


 

 

 

 

 

Dylan's Birthday Party - Old Fashion Fun

On Saturday we had a birthday party for Dylan.

The theme was "God Old Fashion Fun"

We went back to the basics...

Balloons, cake, ice cream, games and friends. 

No over the top decor, nothing elaborate. 

It was perfect and the kids all had so much fun!

Here's the invite:

The message read:

Remember how it was before?

Parks, Balloons, and Games Galore?

Simple, Retro is the Way

Just good friends and lots of play!

We hope you can join us to celebrate Dylan's 8th birthday! 

I wanted the cake table to be super simple, but bright and fun...

 

 

This is the first time that I've ever tried to make a cake for a birthday party.
I was pretty please with the way it turned out. However, on the park it cracked in two places... boo!
Sadly, I didn't have a before picture.
 

Daniel always plans the games for our parties.

This year with "Old Fashion Fun" as our theme, he did some old playground favorites.
We started the party with kick ball. I'm pretty sure the boys could have all played this game the whole time of the party. The girls on the other hand, wanted pretty much nothing to do with it.

 

 

Usually, we would do cake and ice cream at the end of a party. But this year our party didn't end until 8pm and we didn't want to feed kids sugar that late in the evening. Instead we stopped for cake and ice cream at the top of the party.
 

 

 

This cake was huge. IT was four boxes of cake and six cans of frosting. I thought we would have a tun left. WRONG! it was almost all gone.
 

We played a few more games after we served cake.
I don't have a lot of pictures that I can share from the games,  because I don't post picture of other people's kids on here. Daniel did a great job with the games though.
We played Red Rover Red Rover, Freeze Tag, and Fishy Fishy Cross My Ocean.

Red Rover was a definite favorite. I was so tickled though because NONE of the kids knew what the game was or how to play. Once they got the drift of it, they all had a great time.
 

There were at least 60 people at this party. I was running around like a crazy woman and didn't get nearly as many pictures as I would have liked. Mainly I wish I would have taken more pictures of the sweet details of the party, like this precious banner my mom made for Dylan. 

All in all, it was another great party.
I hope Dylan will have amazing memories of it as he grows up.

After the party, we let 4 of Dylan's best friends spend the night.

This was his first time to have a sleepover here at the house (he's been to two so far).
The boys were all so fun and sweet. 

Until Next Year...

Dylan's Birthday

I still can't believe my baby is eight. That sounds like such a big kid to me. And I guess he is. He's a wonderful, sweet, smart, and funny big kid.

We started the morning SUPER early. Daniel had to be at work at 6:30 because he was taking a half off and leaving work really early in the day. This means Daniel leaves the house at 5:30 AM. I knew Dylan would be sad if he woke up on his birthday and his Daddy wasn't there, so I told Daniel he could wake Dylan up at 5:20 and have some birthday-cuddle time. Well, our little birthday man woke up on his own around 5:15. He was too excited to sleep, I guess. London heard all the commotion and soon she was wide awake. Since we were all up I decided to cook breakfast right then so that Daniel could eat with us. I am NOT a morning person, and I'm pretty sure my eyes were never 100% open during breakfast, but I'm so glad that we had time to begin our day together, especially on Dylan's big day.

 

 

This year was a little different than years past. For the first time since he's been in school, Dylan's birthday did not fall on Labor Day weekend. Also, London just started school, so she wasn't with us during the day. It was sort of odd, but it turned out to still be a great day and we still found time to cram in lots of birthday love and celebration.

Daniel met me at Dylan's school and we had lunch together. I stopped and picked up Taco Bell, per the Birthday Boy's request.

 

We asked the teacher if we could come back in the afternoon and bring cupcakes.Dylan was so funny acting like he was directing the music while his friends sang happy birthday. I love that he doesn't shrivle up and feel embarrassed being the center of attention, but to the contrary he thrives in the spot light. I have no idea where he got that from ;)

 

I have always made cupcakes for Dylan's class on his birthday. I love making cupcakes and finding cute ways to decorate them. This year when we started talking about class cupcakes Dylan said he wanted to buy them at the store. I almost let it hurt my feelings but I think its just something new and fun for him. I have to admit it was nice to not be up until midnight the night before making cupcakes.  And I'm tickled pink to annouce that after trying something new, Dylan has told me that my cupcakes taste better and that next year he'd like me to go back to making them. THAT makes for a happy mommy heart. 

 

We picked London up from school and rushed home for her to decorate a birthday cake for her brother.
She picked out all the decorations and nd did 90% of the decorating all by her self.
 

She picked green frosting, stars, and worms for his cake. She called said the theme (yes, my 3 year old knows what a theme is and uses the word pretty often, actually) was "Out of Space Worms". She said she chose this because her brother loves worms and out of space. LOVE!
 

Back tracking here, but another tradition we have is to fill the birthday boy/girl's room with balloons, while they sleep, the night before their birthday. My kids LOVE this tradition. They wake up so excited to play in their balloon pit. And the balloons stay around for at least a week or so.
 

 

Okay, back on track now...
Grammy came over and when Dylan got home from school we opened presents and blew out the candles on his cake. We meant to eat cake, but the kids got so distracted with playing with toys that we actually forgot to!!
 

 

 

 

I have to take a second to note some of the things on Dylan's wishlist this year because I feel like it speaks to how grown up he is becoming. On the top of his list were: a phiten necklace, football gloves, and a video game. I mean, I couldn't stop smiling when I was shopping at the sports store for my boy's birthday. Thats always something I dreamt having a boy would include (sporty stuff like that) but I imagined it being for a big teenage boy.


London was SO proud of her cake and was smiling ear to ear when she gave it to her bubba. 

 

 

 

I think our boy had a great birthday.
Saturday is his birthday party, I should probably get busy working on that.