Celebrating kids birthdays

You can find some of the most interesting and heartwarming things over at the Society of Canadian Catholic Bloggers, such as this post by Embracing the Now  (this is an excerpt--go read it all, it will warm your heart!)

February 7, 2012

kid-focused birthdays

We could call this post "blurry photo alert!" because if kid birthdays are nothing else, they are often a flurry of movement that can be almost impossible to capture without an expensive camera, of which I am currently deprived.

But I've been thinking a lot lately about how we do birthdays, and since my poor little Jeremiah didn't get to enjoy a blog post when he turned five three days before Christmas (come to think of it, I don't think that I have ever blogged about his birthday), I thought that he deserved an honourable mention. By the time I had four kids, I learned a little about setting priorities. Home-made cakes (with butter and icing sugar frosting) have always been something that I've wanted to be part of my kids' childhood, but letting them be involved in how we celebrate their birthdays is really important to us as well. The last few years have involved a lot of scenes like this one pictured above. Do you see the five made out of blueberries? Look closely? This particular cake was basically a large blueberry muffin (he requested a blueberry cake) baked in a pie pan. So easy since I didn't even have to remove the cake from the pan to serve it. Yes, that is partially melted icing on the cake (we were in a hurry to get it decorated and it hadn't quite cooled yet). And the second one? That was for Christmas morning brunch. Ha, ha. Aren't I clever, multi-tasking like that?

And Thetheologyofdad, host of the new Canadian Catholic blog aggregator, has posted some nice pictures of his lovely family.  He writes:

 You may have been wondering why no pictures of the family for a while. See, it was shame-motivated. I had given a blogging buddy a hard time for this same thing once. She had not been posting pictures because she could not find the cable to upload the pictures to her computer. This same thing happened to me. Now it is found, so the shame has lifted and we can all sit back and enjoy the Kerr family for a few minutes:

There are lots more pictures here.

And speaking of birthdays----here is some news about the fifth birthday party of the most beautiful boy in the world:

Since we were in Greer on Ben's birthday, we had his birthday party a week later. This is the first real birthday party I have thrown for him and I think it was a HUGE success. He chose transformer theme (well, I kind of encouraged that theme since I had obtained all the decoration and plates etc on clearance:) ). We had 4 kids show up and it was the perfect number - any more and it would have been chaos!

When the kids arrived they were greeted by a large Optimus Prime Truck. I had built it out of cardboard boxes and table cloths, with Ben (and Mae's) assistance. I was sure the party would destroy it but it turned out to be super sturdy and is STILL sitting in my front room 1 week later. Not sure what I am going to do with it as it's too cool to throw out!
We also had a table set up with a bunch of Ben's transformer toys for the kids to play with.
After everyone had arrived, our 1st activity was making our own transformer pictures. I had precut all different shapes and colors of construction paper and gave each child a glue stick and blank paper to create their transformer on. This activity was completed in about 4 minutes :)