The Story Of Us

We celebrated H's 9th birthday earlier in the month. We threw him a Secret Agent birthday party at home. But before I get to the party details I need to do a mini rant. This was the tenth kids birthday party we have thrown. This includes parties at home and at venues. Never ever had we had a more horrid experience with the kids and the party then we had with this particular party. We had a total of eight children in attendance, all third graders. We had set up stations and created puzzles and codes and most of these kids struggled with these missions. They couldn't follow directions, a few of them couldn't read the larger words, they struggled to put together the most basic puzzles and instead only wanted to wrestle and smack each other in the bums and trash the house. We were appalled. We tried to make the best of the situation but it's not even about the party.. these kids are our future. They are being raised in a world where sports are more important than school, sc

Friday was the kids last day of school.. hello summer! Now usually I love summer vacation. The kids and I are ready to break out of our routines, we don't do any classes or camps and just try to relax (in a A type personality semi organized manner) lol. But we are in the age of COVID and I have already had three months of way too much kid time.. so let's see how this goes. Tomorrow is D's 10th birthday.. double digits.. so we threw him a surprise party over the weekend. It was a small close friends and kids outdoor backyard party.. we did our due diligence with social distancing, hand washing etc.. It was wonderful seeing everyone after so long.. Not a lot of pictures.. didn't even get one of the cake.. :(  But we had our first pinata Sunday was Father's Day.. the kids made a coupon book for M   Our restaurants are open for outdoor eating but with elderly parents in the house we are still not ready to venture out for a meal so we did what we've been doing for th

We celebrated H turning 6 with an art party.. step one was finding the place.  Luckily we found Marlene at Artisan Studio  who has been running a local studio just 5 minutes away from us for the past 15 years. We went in to meet her, H needed to pick out what he wanted to create during his party and she was full of ideas and helped H find exactly what he wanted to do. It was a Romero Britto inspired Robot.. The next step was the invitation.. I found a free template online.. thank God for the internet. I have used email services like paperlesspost and evite to send out invites and I have sent hard copies to the school as well.. this time I sent the invite in a text message.. not a link to it.. but uploaded it like a photograph right into the text and it was like magic! I got replies much quicker than I have ever before.. Next was the goodie bags.. the A.C Moore (craft store) in our area was having a massive store closing sale and we stocked up on these art sets For the cak

Last weekend our eldest turned 9.. and we threw him an amazing race birthday party! As with all the boys other parties.. I bought a plain white cake from Wegmans and let D decorate it himself. We had a total of nine kids.. they picked bandanna's out of a bag to create 3 teams. First Task Not all the kids knew each other.. they were too amped up with the idea of winning that they couldn't manage to calm down and read the clue.. so we had to really guide them through it.. they made mistakes and we let it go.. it seemed a tad chaotic..  Second Task I had 33 little medicine cups filled with M&M's and Goldfish crackers.. 6 of them had stickers on the bottom. The first two teams found the sticker in the first try... what are the odds!? And the third team had to eat a lot of snacks before they finally found their sticker. Third Task I bought 48 piece puzzles from the Dollar Tree. The boys took their time making