Birthday Parties

Yesterday was Saturday. And We got to celebrate the birthday of my beautiful cousin-in-law Janel!One of my favorite parts of seeing Janel and her husband Jared is that I get to help her to prepare for her kindergarten class.

How do I do this you ask? I use crayons to colour in things like this...

Yesterday Janel had a huge stack of pages all related to colours. Green, purple, black, white, ect. Each colour was represented by a "monster," (albeit they were flufy and weird-shaped, but definitely not monsters) At the bottom of the page it said things like "Red, Red Ate a Bed!" or "Pink, Pink, Sat In a Sink!."

Doesn't this make make you want to be a kid again? 

I also made a chocolate ice cream cake- mostly it was just a really good brownie recipe (Hershey's) with crumbled mint cookies in between the brownie and the ice cream and hot fudge sauce on top- it was really good!

We didn't use candles- but that was probably a good thing. It melted way faster than I had originally thought. ( As you can tell by the above picture) Henry licked his plate though, (literally) so I thought that was a good sign that it turned out well.

We don't really do gifts for family, whether it's a birthday or Christmas. It just gets too expensive with so many people; Henry is the oldest of seven, and Janel and her siblings were so close to Henry growing up that they were more like brother and sister than cousins. And there are 12 of them!

But we are big believers in gag gifts. Nothing makes me happier than finding something really weird at D.I. (not a hard feat in the least- usually I can't decide what weird thing I want more) to give to my wonderful, eclectic brother, Cory. Or In this case...since Janel is diabetic....

                                              (Note the princess crown- it's a birthday-must)

This is what we give Janel every year for her birthday- and every year she pretends to be surprised for our sake. She really is too kind.

This year the wrapping paper was just as fun though- so these pictures are kind of in reverse:

And you will never guess where we found this wrapping paper...

Uh-huh... at the D.I.

We found it when we first moved to Utah after we got married- and it was like Utah's welcome home gift to us. Because really...what are the odds that we would find Penn State wrapping paper in Mormon-land! 

(For those of you unenlightened individuals who have yet to experience the ultimate of consignment shops- D.I. stands for Deseret Industries and is run by the LDS Church out here in the west. You can find anything and everything there-)

SO we had a great time last night- including a swim at the pool at Janel's complex- complete with duck feathers, bird poop. and several small boat toys left behind by neglectful children. (We had quite a lot of fun playing with said toys- didn't I mention earlier that I want to be a kid again?)

 So all in all- we have had a pretty good weekend. I even got to watch this cool show called "Cash and Cari" which makes me want to learn how to reupholster furniture, learn about antique clocks and know how to run an estate sale- all at the same time!
 

Life is good, isn't it? ; )