Birthday Blog Update(s)

Well here it is May already and I'm just now getting around to blogging about Collin & Gwen's Birthdays. That's what happens when you have an 8 month old that STILL doesn't sleep through the night. He was doing sooo well too. He was sleeping ALMOST all the way through (like 8 hours!!!) which is insane and awesome....then tragedy struck. He got his first fever :( I mean serious fever too....104.2 to be exact. All the wanted to do way lay in my lap and nurse. Luckily he wanted to nurse because he was getting a good dose of fluids and antibodies. But the fever lasted for 3 days. During that time I wanted him close to me so he slept in our bed and now we have regressed BIG TIME. Last night was a little better and I'm hoping he will continue to sleep again but we will see. He is still not eating much food and wants to nurse a lot more too so I'm thinking he's not getting enough sustainable calories to last him all night. Anyhoo, back to C & G. So Gwen turned 6 on April 5th and we threw a small birthday party for her and 4 of her closest friends at Meadowbrook park. She loves doing scavenger hunts with Sam and since her birthday was so close to Easter we figured it could kind of be a play on an Easter Egg hunt. My thought was this would be an easy, low-key birthday party well....I thought wrong. Timing was everything with this party.The park was really busy because it was such a nice day so we didn't want to hide the clues beforehand in case some other random person walking through the park saw them and messed with them so the plan was Sam was to run ahead of me and hide the clues one by one. When the kids first arrived we had them decorate their goody bags so by the time the hunt was over their bags would be dry and ready to use. While they were distracted with that Sam hid the first clue. They were all into in and found the first clue after some help. Then we headed down the trail and sent the kids on an adventure to find the other 17 clues. The boys were ALL into it. Especially Collin who thought he was "helping" by finding all the clues but um...notsomuch. So I had to reel him in. Half the girls were into the whole time but Gwen and her friend kind of lost interest in trying to catch the boys and find the clues before them so they just held hands and skipped down the trail most of the time. They did perk up though when they found a "candy clue". We put candy in some of the clue boxes for added fun and excitement. Half way through the hunt we stopped for a break to eat more (cause anyone who knows Gwen knows she can't go too long without eating) and recharge with some drinks. The last clue was the ultimate clue box which was full of balloons and each kid had to pop one and only one held the last clue which revealed that the hunt was over they had successfully found all the clues and to head back to the party table for the pinata. The pinata which I made from scratch cause I wasn't about to pay $20 for something they would rip apart in 6 seconds. So I did. The pinata part was easy....the decorating the pinata part SUCKED! But I suffered through. I filled it with candy and was so scared that is was going to fall apart (because I mean, really...how strong can newspaper, flour and water be? I mean it looks pretty precarious at this point)

that I reinforced the hell out of the bottom with cardboard. Gwen wanted a pull string pinata so I also had to figure out a way to attach strings to the bottom. Instead of having the kids pull the strings one at a time I handed them each a string and they all pulled at the same time and..um...nothing happened. I had reinforced it TOO well and all the candy was still stuck inside. Luckily one of the guest's older brother was there and he just started shaking it and all the candy fell down. The unfortunate thing is I didn't get a chance to take too many pictures. During the hunt I was too busy making sure Collin didn't find all the clues and after I was too distracted with leading the party so that was the sad part. Here are a few though.

I think she had fun. The one thing I spent the most time on was probably the thing this kids used the least and were the least interested in...go figure. I made a map from scratch by taking a walk through the park (3 different times I might add) and taking pictures of each of the sculptures and then printing them off into smaller pictures all the while making sure that I tried to angle the curves to match the trail. Um...yeah...HUGE waste of time. But it is still cute. :)

I was going to blog about Collin's birthday to see the Bulls game but I've rambled on far too much for one blog post so I will try to blog about that tomorrow. Toodles!!