The 3rd birthday of the season was for a darling little 3 year old!  Ever since Mackenzie saw me making Charis’ cake back in November, she knew she wanted a pink cake.  And of course the fact that she is obsessed with pink in every single shape and form.  Then as she saw me making Morgan’s cake with pink and purple, she continued to clarify that I would be sure to make her a pink cake.  Only pink.

On Monday, the day before her birthday, I was looking online to see what kind of design to put on the cake.  I saved a few pages and showed her, to which she very adamantly declared she wanted dots on her cake.  So, a pink dotted cake it is!

The birthday girl.  In pink!!

The cake.  It was simple and sweet.  I was most proud of the writing, I have always despised writing on cakes as my letters either go slanted, or they are not centered.  For all the work I put into cakes, the last thing I want to do is mess it up with my writing.  But all the stars aligned for this one, and her name came out perfect!  Maybe I’ll start getting over my fear of writing on cakes.  Maybe.

Birthday girl with her forced smile.  And the pink cake.  With dots.

Cake and presents!  And notice the fabulous backsplash!  Gavin just finished doing it, and it looks so awesome, it absolutely completes the kitchen.  Post on that coming eventually.

Three candles take a while to blow out!

Down to one.  Charis is waiting anxiously in the background for some cake.  She has this cake thing down pat by now since her birthday.

And she did it!

She absolutely loved the cake.  Makes everything worth it.

And of course the middle had to be pink too!  Four layers of it in fact.

Time for some presents.  She opened her princess dolls that I made for her (see my crafty post).  She really liked them.

The big hit of the birthday was both the felt diapers I made for her baby dolls and this rocking cradle that my dad made for her.  She has played with it nonstop, and loves to change the baby’s diapers.  My mom is making a blanket to go in it, but it’s not ready yet.

She also received a tutu, which she soon after declared that she didn’t like and didn’t want.  Go figure, it’s all the handmade gifts that she loves.  And I love that.  Maybe Charis will like tutus…

She had a great day, and sometimes I look at her and am just amazed at how grown up she is getting.  Her speech is still younger than her age, but she’s talking so much better, and able to communicate what she wants to say in her own way.  She has a definite opinion, and considers herself one of the older ones, for sure.  She loves and nurtures her baby dolls, and is such a sweet girl.  I love you Mackenzie, happy birthday!!

I’ve been rather crafty these past couple of months.  Mostly inspired by Pinterest.  Are you on pinterest?  I really love that site.  I don’t really consider it in the same realm as Facebook at all - for me I have a handful of boards and people that I follow, and I have found some fabulous ideas for both gifts and crafts, and lots of other fun stuff.  You can check out my stuff here.

Anyway, here are a few items I have made over the last couple of months.  Starting back in December when I really wanted something to fill a couple of nice glass bowls/platters that I had.  I saw these yarn balls and thought they would be perfect.  And they were!

I actually had some all red ones, but I tossed them after Christmas and plan to make new ones.  I learned through this process that fuzzy yarn doesn’t work that great - the more tightly woven non-fuzzy looks much betters and holds up well.  I bought more yarn and I plan to make more in other colors that go with my every day decor.  What a great inexpensive and cute decorating option!  I also would like to use the same yarn to make some of these.  Again, simple and nice looking.

My next project was to make some headbands for Morgan.  She is obsessed with headbands, wearing them constantly, even to sleep.  She takes them off only to shower and brush her hair.  I bought some cheap dollar store headbands as the base (which I probably would not do again, as 2 of them ended up breaking, and my hours of hard work are now no longer usable), and covered them with braided ribbon and bows.  I thought they came out darling, and so did Morgan.  I’m not quite a photographer like Gavin is, but I tried to get good shots of these.  The only way I could really get them is to do them all separately, so here they are:

This is the braid I did on all of them - this is the only 2 toned one, but you can see the braid really clearly on it.  I found the technique here.  I then hot-glued the braid onto the headband, and added bows (except no bow on this one).

This one was my favorite.  And Morgan’s favorite because it was purple.  It lasted about 4 days.  It then got left on the floor in the middle of her room and got stepped on and broke.  Sad.  When I get a little breathing room (lots going on here these days!) I hope to make her a new one.

This is the other one that broke.  You can sort of see the bent part in the picture.  I didn’t love this one though, I didn’t think that my choice of ribbon for the bow looked super great on the pink braid.  Plan to redo this as well, with a different bow.

This one came out cute.  If I did this one again I would cover the green dollar store headband with the pink I used for the braid.  It looks super cute on her.

This is her current headband of choice.  She’s had it in for going on 6 days or so now. :)  I like it because the brown blends in with her hair so you just see the bright white bow.

So there they are.  These were one of her birthday presents, and she really did love them.  They took a long time, but I loved doing it knowing how much she would enjoy them.

The next thing I was ready to make where these little princess dolls for Mackenzie’s birthday.  She loves anything tiny, and when a very crafty friend showed me the ones she had made and gave me the link, I had to do it.  Really, she had all the supplies, and she insisted that the part of them that I used cost a total of $3.  So, it was just my time invested in these, and they did take quite a while, especially as I’m somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff.  They are all the Disney princesses, painted onto wooden doll figures.  Here is the final product (they are about 3 inches high):

Ariel, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Tiana, Jasmine, Aurora, Snow White, and Belle.

And the backs…

Also for Mackenzie’s birthday I had found a link to a pattern to make some felt diapers for baby dolls.  Since she really enjoyed telling me whenever her babies peed or pooped, and kept trying to run off with our real diapers, I though this would be the perfect gift.  They were super simple to make, took almost no time at all, and were really inexpensive.

I made her 4.  Her baby doll is demonstrating one of them.

And the last thing I have made recently are a couple of tools to help a friend and I memorize the book of Colossians this year.  I saw the idea here, and knew that I wanted to do it.  My friend Laura and I meet occasionally for accountability type stuff, and I had a feeling she would want to do it with me.  I’ve never been very good at memorizing Scripture mostly because I just don’t take the time to do it.  I thought doing this with someone else and having some good tools to help me would be a good motivation.  So far so good, I am about to start week 4!

First off, I made a magnetic Scripture memory picture frame.

I made one for my friend Laura too - I really love the colors on hers - it’s a brown frame with a mat of pinks, purples and blues.  Then I made the verses on pink, purple and blue paper.  My verses are on green, blue, and khaki paper.  Mine goes with my kitchen decor, but I may end up making another one for somewhere else in the same brown I made for my friend.  Got all supplies at Hobby Lobby and cost less than $10 for each.  If you can’t tell from the picture, the dot at the top is a magnet, and the verse is on top of the glass screen.  So you can easily swap them out.

I put it in my kitchen window right above the sink.  And you stay-at-home moms know how much time you spend at the sink every day, right?  It’s become a habit to repeat my verses while I wash the dishes.  That huge stack is all the verses, one card for each week of the year, with each card having 2 verses on it.  I just made a file in Word and cut and paste all the verses so that they would be the right size when printed.  My frame is 3×5, but my friend’s is 4×6.

Then, here is the book.  Again, all the printables are here, I just got the moleskin books that she suggested and glued them all in.  And added a little ribbon to mark the page.

So, there you have it!  Lots of crafty things going on around here.  These things take time, but I really enjoy doing them.  And the fact that the end product is so useful or I know it’s something that will be loved makes it all worth it.  Through this process I’ve realized more and more that I’m a gift person - I have always gotten super excited about getting gifts for people when I have the perfect idea in mind.  Conversely, I really don’t enjoy giving gifts when it’s just something I’ve gotten because I needed to get one.  So finding and then making something that I know someone would enjoy has been so much fun.

I would never say that I am a crafty person.  But I guess the appropriate phrase would be for me to say that I don’t consider myself a creative person.  I’m pretty by the book, have always needed patterns or guides to do anything - even for my cakes.  I find a picture of what I want to make and copy it.  But I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to be creative to be crafty and to make beautiful things.  I love looking around my home and seeing that part of our decor is there because I made it.  And that Morgan’s head constantly adorns my creation.

Now, what from pinterest will I by trying next…

Look a those curls!

All natural!

This head of curls is just so darling.  The back is pretty much always curly, but the top only stays curly for a little while after the bath - as it gets longer, it tends to flatten out a bit more.

Charis is 14 months old, and quite the personality.  She is still very loud and loves to babble.  She pulls up on everything, can cruise a little bit, but is still a very long way from walking.  Following in the footsteps of her older sisters!  She eats anything and everything, and has quite a few teeth that are in.  She loves to be tossed around, and still really loves to snuggle.

Since she can now pull up to everything, she likes to look out the window.  I thought these were especially cute - the perspective of whoever is looking back at her!

Jackson participated in his first pinewood derby with his cub scout pack last Saturday.  He and Gavin spent a few days creating his car - sanding it down to the shape they wanted, weighting it just perfectly at 5 ounces and trying to make it as fast as possible.  Then Jackson painted it.

Apparently pinewood derby tracks are pretty high tech.  The computer tells them where to put which cars so that they can all be on all of the tracks, and it then calculates their time down to 1/100 of a second.  It was quite the event.  After a few very close races, Jackson ended up in 2nd place by only a 200th of a second!  They all had a good time, and now know a little better how to plan out their cars for next year.

At the races, waiting for his car to race.

The boys showing off their cars.  Look at that handsome kid on the right!

Afterwards the boys were all comparing cars.  That’s Jackson’s car on the end.

Receiving his 2nd place award from the pack leader and the cubmaster.

One of Morgan’s 5th birthday presents was to get her ears pierced.  She had been asking for a while last year, then it tapered off.  So I gave her a gift to open for her birthday that had a pair of earrings in it, and then all of a sudden she wasn’t so sure anymore.  It took her a few days to think about it and ask a couple of her friends who have them done if it hurt, and then she was gung-ho again.

I called around and realized that if we wanted to get them both done at the same time we would have to brave the mall on a weekend, as that was the only time there would be 2 workers.  Otherwise I was quite afraid we would leave the store with only one earring done.

So, Saturday Jan 14th was the day!  Here she is before we left:

We had gone by the day before and she had picked out some flowers in purple (the Feb birthstone, but her favorite color) at the Piercing Pagoda in the mall.  So that day the 2 of us went, fought the crowds and the parking and made our way to the store.  There was a 4 month old getting her ears pierced before her, so we had to wait - I made she she didn’t hear that baby crying!

Standing in front of the earring rack with the purple earrings on them!

When it was her turn, they carefully marked a dot on each ear.  Her right ear has this little wrinkle in it that has been there since she was born - I think it’s so cute.  But it made it a bit tricky to set up the dots so that visually they looked even.  They did get it quickly, as I was glad as I think she was starting to get nervous.  She sat back, they each had their little guns, and did them on the count of three.  She jumped, and I think was quite stunned by how much it hurt.  She had a look on her face that seemed like she wanted to burst into tears, but she didn’t!  She was a bit too stunned to pay much attention to the earrings we were showing her in the mirror.

Looking a bit rough, but being a tough girl.  Look at those pretty earrings!

We got our stuff and went down to get some ice cream.  By the time she was done eating she said they didn’t hurt anymore.  I have to say this whole time I was analyzing her ears because I had been totally paranoid about them being uneven.  I kept thinking that they were, and wasn’t sure what to do about it.  I spent the next few hours looking at her ears, and finally decided that they were fine.  Maybe they were off by a miniscule amount, but it would not be worth the trauma of taking them out, letting them heal, and going again.  And now, 2 weeks later, I don’t think they are crooked at all.  I think that the left one was maybe angled up a bit more and is higher in the back, and because of the length of the starter posts (they are long to allow for cleaning the ears easily), it looked like it hung down farther, but really it didn’t.  And once she changes her starter posts the fronts will look totally even.  Anyway, I was just paranoid about it, but it all turned out fine.  And here she is with her earrings:

They look SO cute on her.  They don’t hurt at all when we clean them and they are healing great.  She will have these in for many months, because I don’t plan to buy another pair of these type of earrings (I had NO idea how expensive they were - then the piercing was ‘free’ - ha!).  In about 7-8 months she can change them out to other cute ones.  She absolutely loves them.

My oldest daughter turned 5 on December 29th.  Amazing.  She had somewhat of an ongoing birthday celebration because of the timing of it all, being right after Christmas.  Because we have multiple Christmas gift-opening sessions with the grandparents after Christmas, with her birthday mixed in there it always seem that she opens gifts for days on end.  Hopefully it makes up for not having any the rest of the year!

When she saw me making Charis’ cake, she decided then and there that she wanted a pink and purple flowered cake.  This cake was actually a lot of fun to make - it didn’t take me days, like some of them do, and I really liked how it came out.  I tried a new icing - instead of my standard buttercream, I wanted to do a cream cheese based frosting.  I wasn’t sure how it would pipe out, but as long as I had it at the right temperature, it ended up working out great.  And I personally thought it tasted better than the buttercream, but the kids all said they liked my other frosting better (the buttercream).  We are in the middle of birthday season, so they will get their wish very soon with Mackenzie’s birthday!

The flowers were made from fondant, I got some new flower cutters.  The piping is all cream cheese icing.

Side view.  I got the cake idea from a picture we found online that Morgan really liked.  I changed it up a bit, but it always helps me to have a guide to get started!

My 5 year old fairy princess!

It took quite a few tries to get all those candles blown out.

One of her birthday gifts was a personalized princess book.  It’s really cute - Morgan is one of the main characters, and it even refers to her friends and her birthday.

Gavin’s parents gave her a set of the 7 Disney princess (Barbie-style).  She loved this gift.

Morgan is obsessed with headbands.  She sleeps in them, and the only time they ever come off are to get into the bath or to brush her hair.  She has one in at all times.  I wanted to make her some headbands so I bought some cheap ones at the dollar store, covered them with ribbon I braided using a technique I found on the web, and put bows on them.  I made her 5 of them, but knew her favorite would be this purple one.  It’s her favorite color, and I think it turned out the best of the bunch.

Mackenzie shows off the other 4 headbands - all at once!

And couldn’t leave out sweet Charis.  She watched as Morgan opened her gifts, but absolutely devoured the cake.  She has a very developed sweet tooth since her birthday a month ago!

Morgan’s big gift from us was getting her ears pierced.  She had been asking quite a bit earlier in the year, but then wasn’t so sure when we told her about it.  She has since come around and is dying to go and get it done.  I just need to call ahead to make sure they have 2 people in the store so they can do both ears at the same time!

For Jackson’s 5th birthday he got a special trip with Gavin to go and see the space shuttle launch, with an extra fun day trip to Disney World.  Morgan is not having a party this year, as we plan to take her on a special trip of her own, probably in February.  It’s not definite, but we are thinking about taking her to Disney for a day - it would be most likely just Morgan and I.  But the cutest part was when we were explaining to her that she wasn’t having a party because she would have a trip, and she got SO excited and started jumping up and down and said ‘you mean like me and you can go to Dunkin Donuts?’  If that’s all we have to do to make her happy, that sure would be easy (and cheap!).  I know she will love a special trip that is a bit farther away than the local Dunkin Donuts!  Her personality is so cute.

Happy Birthday Morgan, we love you!!

While we were at my parents, we had a chance to go on a zipline canopy tour right outside of Asheville, NC.  My mom had bought a groupon a few months back, and wanted to do it when we were all there for Christmas.  She lined up a babysitter for the day for the kids, and we headed out with my parents and my sister Melissa and her boyfriend Brian.  It was a cold and windy day, but we bundled up and all had a really fun time.

Note - all these pictures were taking with our phones, so not quite as good quality as normal!

Before we went up in the course we practiced on some lines right on the ground.  Even Gavin had to go through the training despite the fact he spends much of his time at camp hanging from trees! :)  It does show what a small challenge course world it is - in talking to one of our guides, it turns out they know a whole lot of the same people in the industry.

Suited up and ready to do my practice zip.

Up in the course, coming in for the landing.  This was a short zip, some of them were a few hundred feet long, and the longest was 1200 feet.

Melissa and Brian, getting ready for the final 1200 foot double zip.

Melissa and Brian on the final zip.  They were planning to race, but since speed goes by weight, Brian had quite the advantage.  Our guide held him back when Melissa pushed off but I think he still caught up and beat her.

The 6 of us at the end of the day.  It was really fun, and my parents did great!  (and no, my mom does not have blue hair - she laughed until she cried when she saw this picture.  She had on a hat that was pink purple and blue, but here it just looks like a wig!)

One last picture of me and my sweetie.

While we were visiting my parents right after Christmas, they celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary (Dec 28th).  My sister Melissa had a great idea to make it fun and special for them, so we made most of the dinner (my Dad wanted to make his signature pork, so we let him handle that), and set up a nice candlelight romantic dinner for my parents.

It kind of looks like a restaurant, right?

We all wrote them a little letter (kids included) that they had waiting for them at their seats.

We had them dress up as if they were going out on a date, served them their drinks, and got them seated.

The hearts made out of M&Ms were a nice touch.

Some conversation as they waited for their meal.

Mackenzie really wanted to go and sit with Nana.  I was holding them back!

After dinner they played John Lennon’s “Imagine”, the song they danced to at their wedding.  I was actually downstairs putting Charis to bed, but apparently they danced!

After dinner we had put together a couple pages of questions to ask to learn more about their wedding and initial years together.  Then we had a version of the newlywed game that we asked them and had fun with.

Congrats to my parents on 40 years of marriage!!

We celebrated Christmas Eve and Christmas day here at home again this year.  It is fun to have our own traditions that the kids look forward to, now that we have been home for 3 years.  Some of our traditions are:

• fondue on Christmas Eve (believe it or not, Gavin and I both grew up with this tradition in our homes!)
• Christmas Eve gifts of new pajamas, an ornament for the tree, and a family game.  The kids put on their PJs and we play the game before bedtime.
• Christmas morning singing of Happy Birthday to Jesus (who this year appeared in the manger in the nativity set on Christmas morning)
• Christmas breakfast of meat pie (a Desnoyers family tradition), monkey bread, and pineapple.
• I write Christmas letters to the kids and to Gavin every year and put them in their stocking.  A small way to remember the year and remind them how much I love them.  One day I will put them all together and give to the kids, and hope it will be a sweet thing for them.
• New this year: I took Jackson and Morgan to the dollar store to buy gifts for everyone in our family.  Jackson spent his own money.

No one woke up early, in fact I was the first one up at 8:15 when I came down to get the dough going for the monkey bread.  The kids came down not long after that and discovered their stockings, which occupied them for quite some time.  A little while later we moved to the living room and the gifts under the tree.  We get the kids each 3 gifts each every year.

Jackson picked out this tutu for Mackenzie at the dollar store.  Pink, her favorite color!

Charis received a number of re-gifts this year.  She loves her ‘new’ truck, and I think the other kids love pushing her around on it even more!

Jackson is wondering what is in this big package over by the window.

A fairy princess costume!

Opening my gift from Morgan that she picked out at the dollar store (very secretly, I might add)

Jackson is our game kid.  He LOVES games.  He is playing Scrabble Flash (wearing his new iron man costume) - this game is really fun, Gavin and I have had a lot of fun playing it as well.

One day Mackenzie will kill me for posting this picture.  Here she is, sporting her new tutu.  And her diaper. :)  I did think I was going to get a huge Christmas present when she wanted to put on panties for the first time on Christmas day.  It wasn’t too much later that she was wet, and we put her back into a diaper - I was not quite ready to start potty training, but it’s coming very soon!  She got a cowgirl costume, which is on the floor next to her.

And finally the play dough pizza station was a big hit - it was a gift for Mackenzie, although all the kids have enjoyed playing with it.  There is pretty much a constant scattering of play dough under the art table in our kitchen!

On the 26th we went to my parents in South Carolina and had a nice Christmas celebration with them, my sister, and her boyfriend.  We returned on the 29th, meeting Gavin’s parents here at our house, and then celebrating with them.  It was a fun Christmas season!

In mid-December we had a goodbye party for some dear friends who are moving to Belgium.  Their departure date actually got pushed back from the original date of Dec 30 to the new date of Jan 30, which we were all so glad for!  I met Mary in a Bible Study back in 2009 right after Mackenzie was born.  She was the one who told me about DASCH, the homeschool group we are now a part of.  Because we do so many things with DASCH and our kids are all involved in the same stuff, we have all become good friends.  Her son Luke is Jackson’s absolute best friend, her daughter Emma is a great friend of Morgan’s, and  Gavin has even done a number of things with her husband Jason.  So our entire family will truly miss them.

So before their departure date got pushed back, we had planned a going away party for them with DASCH.  Despite it being mid-December in the midst of all the Christmas parties, there ended up being a total of about 80+ people there (kids included).  It was a fun time to be with them, and was even more fun when a few of us stayed really late (I think my kids got to bed at 11 that night).

Gavin and I, along with Laura and Jimmy (Laura had her baby less than a week after this picture was taken!), and Mary and Jason.  We have done a few things together both as couples and as separate guys/girls.  Mary and Jason will be greatly missed!

All the DASCH ladies who were at the party.  I printed this picture into an 8×10 and put it into a frame, and we all signed the mat.  Just a little something so they never forget us!

Jackson has had a couple of friends move away over the past year, but this one will be the hardest for him.  He and Luke are just perfect little friends and have such a wonderful time together.  Even in a big group you can always find the two of them playing together.  They even hold hands when they are going somewhere (obviously not old enough to have outgrown that!).  I know it will be a sad day for Jackson to say goodbye to his best friend.

Guess we might need to work in a trip to Belgium sometime!