Garrett's 14th Birthday Family Party

We decided it would be easier to separate the birthday celebrations with friends and family. Saturday was the friends day and Sunday we invited grandparents to come over, which were Curtis's parents, my dad and step mom and my grandma. Since we were inviting them over for a birthday party we decided to have dinner with them as well. Curtis cooked some steak on the BBQ grill, which we all really liked. He wasn't totally satisfied with how it turned out since the grill cooked the steak faster than he wanted and he thought it was a little too salty. We all thought it tasted just fine. His parents brought some home made potato salad and my parents brought green bean casserole. Everything was delicious!

A week ago we had tried to cook peach cobbler in our dutch oven in the back yard with charcoal. The first problem was that when I mixed up the batter I forgot to add the eggs so it was thicker than usual but I thought maybe that's because the recipe used butter instead of oil. Well, then it burned on the bottom. It didn't taste very good. So I suggested to Garrett, that we make it again on Sunday for his birthday cake. He doesn't like cake but he does like cobbler. Go figure. This time I made the cake the regular way baking it in the oven and I made sure to add all of the ingredients. It turned out much better!

After we finished eating dinner we moved to the front room and sang the birthday song with 14 candles on the cobbler. It took him a couple of breaths to blow them all out. Note to self, skinny birthday candles will melt off into your cake if your cake is still warm! LOL I had to dig out as much wax as I could when serving it up on plates. I ended up taking videos instead of getting pictures of the birthday donut and cobbler when he blew out the candles. Then to give our stomachs a little time to digest dinner we had him do gift opening next. Afterwards the kids took turns playing the Quick Pucks game with Gaya while others visited and Garrett looked at all of his gifts. Then he played us some tunes on his drum set.

He received a BSU bobble head from Gpa Tony and Gma Vernie.

He received a BSU t-shirt, bag of Reese's and a new card game from Gma and Gpa Butterfield. You can tell by the look on his face that he loves Reese's.

Nikki bought Garrett an eraser making kit. He can create his own fun erasers!

Garrett and Nikki have been watching Back to the Future lately and love it so Curtis and I bought this co op game for him. Co op means that all the players work together to get to an end goal.

And the big one this year was adding the missing piece to his drum set, the ride cymbal. He's been asking for a ride cymbal ever since January.

He's so happy to have a complete drum set now and decided to play for us for a bit.

Checking out the Back to the Future game, which is more detailed than we thought. It's a Derek and Stillman type of game 😆.

This boy has been growing like a weed! He has literally grown several inches in the past year and is now the same height as me.

At the end of the evening Curtis sat down and figured out how to play the Back to the Future game with the boys. (Nikki and I were working on Tooth Fairy business)

It took a little while to figure it out but they enjoyed it. I'm sure it will go faster next time now that they know how to play. The dice gets rolled by dropping it in the clock tower and it rolls out in front of it. I thought that was neat.

We sure love Garrett and the young man he is becoming and can't believe how fast he's growing (especially this last year!). We can't wait to see what music he can play with this drum set either. Even now I hear him play in the family room and I start tapping or dancing along. Happy birthday Garrett!

Garrett's 14th Birthday Friends Party

Today is Garrett's 14th birthday and we did some celebrating over the weekend. We started out with a friends birthday party on Saturday. He invited 3 friends: Austin, Sadie and Kayla. All 3 are in our ward at church. After our ward breakfast social we came home and cleaned up the house to get ready for friends to come around 1:30pm. We were debating on whether to eat right at the beginning or do it at the end since he was ending the party at 5:00pm. Finally we decided it would be best to do it at the beginning. We had pizza (Garrett's favorite), salad and soda pop. Austin and Sadie showed up first at the scheduled time but Kayla came late. While waiting for Kayla the other kids played some foosball in our family room and then went outside to the play house where they took turns on the swings and hammocks. 

After Kayla finally arrived we did the birthday singing and gifts. Garrett doesn't really like cake so he had donuts for his "cake". For years now I have been telling the kids that they can choose their own dessert item for their birthday. No sense in making cake if they don't want to eat it! 

They then went to the family room to play some Mario Kart on the video game system (the Switch). The original idea was to watch a movie next but they didn't have time so they just hung out and went back outside to the play set for awhile. Sadie had to leave early and after hanging out a little while more we got the donut eating game set up. We did this last because they were so full from eating pizza and donuts earlier. Garrett really likes donuts! At the very end they watched Garrett play his new Zelda game. I wish they would have played a card game or something together because it would be boring to me to sit there and watch someone else play at a birthday party. Oh well. They still all had a good time.

Sadie getting pushed on the swing by Charlotte.

Now Alice joined Sadie and Austin got on the other swing. They love the swings!

Jack wrapped his gift to Garrett in the biggest box and titled it the Ogre box because he wrapped it in layers. You'll understand if you've seen the movie "Shrek" where ogres are like onions, they have layers, lol.

Charlotte picked out this game for Garrett and we made it from both of the girls. It's called Quick Pucks.

Jack earned money by working at my grandma's house and saved enough money to buy Garrett this game, which was wrapped in the ogre box. That is amazing to me considering how expensive video games are. This one was around $50!

Playing Mario Kart

Charlotte and Alice are ready for the donut eating game.

Jack, Austin, Garrett, Kayla all ready for the donut eating game. Garrett was the one who planned his party so he really wanted to play this game even though he was already having donuts for his "cake".

I will post about our family birthday celebration that we had on Sunday in the next post.

Tooth Fairy Forgets

Charlotte had a loose tooth for a couple of weeks. Last Saturday morning while we were at the church for a drive through breakfast social in the parking lot, Charlotte was eating her breakfast burrito when her tooth came out! She was so excited! I wrapped it in a napkin and put it in my pocket until we got home. Then I put it in a small snack size zip lock bag. She put it under her pillow, excited for the Tooth Fairy to come that night!

To her great disappointment Sunday morning the Tooth Fairy had forgotten (and this is not the first time this has happened with our family). What's worse is that the Tooth Fairy was reminded by Charlotte Saturday night before she went to bed. The Tooth Fairy must have gotten so busy or was just so tired from the day's activities that she forgot! I told Charlotte that the Tooth Fairy must have just been too busy to make it to our house last night. So I told her to put it back under her pillow again and hopefully the Tooth Fairy will come tonight (Sunday night). 

After she was put in bed I asked Nikki to help with the Tooth Fairy letter that needed to be written to Charlotte. Nikki did the "Dear Charlotte" part with her water color paints and then the Tooth Fairy wrote the rest in marker. Charlotte was very pleased Monday morning when she discovered not only a baggie with 6 quarters in it but also a big envelope with a letter inside. The letter read "Dear Charlotte, I am truly sorry that I didn't make it to your home last Saturday night to collect your newly lost tooth! You must have been so disappointed. Please forgive me and know that I will try my hardest not to let it happen again. Keep on smiling!  Tooth Fairy "

Thankfully she was satisfied and happy with the Tooth Fairy and so excited to tell her friends. She was also surprised that the Tooth Fairy knew her name. I told her the Tooth Fairy knows just like Santa Claus and Jesus and Heavenly Father.

Painting is Fun!

The first week of going back to school with the hybrid schedule went pretty well except Jack missed the bus after school on Monday so I had to go pick him up. Nikki seems to be the only one of my kids who doesn't like the hybrid schedule but that's because her schedule changed from the normal high school schedule. The normal schedule would be an A day/B day schedule where they would go to 4 classes each day and alternate but now they do all 8 classes in one day at shortened times. It will be nice when it goes back to normal.

Thursday morning I had to take the boys to school instead of them riding the bus because Garrett needed to take his percussion set to school. It's big and heavy so it would be hard to get on the bus. This was the first time I had to wake up the girls early to take kids to school. Last year whenever I took Garrett early I would just leave Jack in charge of the girls and let the girls sleep longer. With Jack in middle school now I can no longer do that. And since I woke the girls up so early that morning it didn't take long for them to get ready for school and then we had a lot of extra time. Charlotte really wanted to do some painting with some old paints that Nikki gave her (that she got from her art teacher) so I decided why not do some art before school? 

A few days ago Jack and I had gone to the dollar store to get some birthday stuff for Garrett and we saw these little art painting kits for Fall and thought it would be fun to do these as a family. We grabbed 2 of each design so we came home with 8 of them, leaving an extra just in case. Charlotte was anxious to do these ever since she saw them but I kept telling her we had to wait and do it as a family because that's what we had intended. I'm so glad I made her wait because it was fun finally doing it together as a family after we went to church this morning. Everyone enjoyed it! Not only was the painting fun to do but having some nice instrumental music playing in the background just made it relaxing as well.

Dog Sitting and 2nd First Day of School

Last week we had the opportunity to serve a brother from church who needed surgery on his back. He's elderly and doesn't have family around but needed someone to help take care of his young dog, Sophie. I was a little reluctant to be honest because I knew she might get excited and pee on our carpet since we watched her once before last year and she had some accidents in our house. She is an indoor dog but she's still young. We tried to have a puppy back in February this year, a border collie/pit bull mix, which equals lots of energy, biting and accidents.  We had decided after 9 days of having her that it just wasn't good for her or us to keep her.  That is why I was a little anxious when Curtis told me that our friend Barry from church needed help watching his dog. I went ahead and said yes. 

Curtis picked her up Wednesday after work and the girls were so excited. But within the first 5 minutes of Sophie being inside the house, she had several accidents. This happened while I was cooking dinner. Curtis could see on my face that I was really unhappy about it so he cleaned up the messes and came up with the idea to move my van out of the garage and to the driveway. Sophie could have the garage and we could open the side garage door for her to be able to go into the back yard when she needed to do her business or just run around. That's what we did and it was a great idea! After that I was much more comfortable about watching her. I did have to clean up a few of her messes but I didn't mind so much because at least the messes were not inside my house. Overall it was fun to watch her. We even took her on a few walks.

Charlotte and Alice spent a lot of time outside since we had Sophie. It was a good motivator for Charlotte to get her school work done. They loved playing with the dog and even put her in the swing with them!

We were only expecting to keep her until Friday night but Barry was in a lot more pain than he thought so of course we kept her until he was feeling better. It was Sunday morning when he decided he was ready to have her home again. He was missing her.

It was pretty funny to watch our cats interact with Sophie while she was here. Sage must have remembered Sophie from when we watched her last year because she did really well. She would  let Sophie come up by her and she would just watch her. There were only a couple times that Sage would hiss a little or swipe her paw at her. Stardust on the other hand, she was in total defense mode the first time she encountered Sophie. Raised back and hair standing up as tall as she could get it. One of the kids came out to distract Sophie while I grabbed Star and brought her inside. I think she was thankful to me for doing that, lol. Normally she loves to be outside but she was happy to get inside away from the dog. After that, she was more cautious about when to go outside or when to approach the door when she was ready to come in and eat her dinner.

There was one night last week where Alice didn't want to go to bed even after we put the other kids in bed. Curtis told her to sit on our recliner with just a lamp light on and look at her books. Not long after that I came out to see her like this...fast asleep with her book leaning against her face.

I didn't get any pictures but Monday (2 days ago) was the first day our kids got to go back to school in person, their 2nd first day of school. They were happy and excited even though things were going to be a lot different. They split up the schedule so that last names A-L go to school on Mondays and Thursdays and last names M-Z go to school on Tuesdays and Fridays to keep the class sizes small. Wednesdays are still no new learning days where they basically have the day to catch up on work. The days that they are not at school in person they will be doing online assignments from their teachers. All kids have to wear a mask all day long, except when eating or drinking. Charlotte even has to wear it when she's at recess. And recess is very controlled. They have 6 recess zones (one for each grade) where they have to play in the same area but they rotate zones each week. They have sanitizer right by each entrance to the building and have to use it each time they come in. They use it frequently throughout the day also and wipe down their desks. The drinking fountains are off limits and every one has to bring their own water bottle, which they can refill. Every time they go to music or PE they have to exit out the back of the building and walk around to the 1st grade door. Every grade is assigned a certain door to enter the building in elementary school. 

Nikki went from having an A day, B day schedule to having all 8 classes in one day, just shortened class time. There are also several lunch times. They try to stagger everything so there's less people in the lunch room and hallways. Middle school used to not allow back packs in the classrooms. They would have to put them in their lockers. This year, it's the opposite. No lockers so they have to bring their backpacks with them to every class and those with small instruments in band and orchestra have to carry their instruments with them to each class. That means Jack. Garrett is percussion so that's considered a big instrument and he can leave it in the band room.

Anyway, it's kind of crazy but it's good to have them in school again. I just wish they didn't have to wear masks for such a long period of time. I hate wearing masks. It causes breathing problems for me some times. The nice thing for me is that ALL 5 of my kids are in school on Mondays. That's 3 hours of alone time for me, woo hoo!! I took advantage and did some Costco and Walmart shopping this week. Then went home and ate lunch in the quiet and caught up on reading Laverne's blog posts. 

Garrett's First Job and Other Random Stuff

I received a text message on Monday from a woman in our ward whom I work with in our primary calling as activity boy leaders (formerly cub scouts), Sis Susan Cleverly. She had asked me if Garrett mowed lawns or if I knew someone who did. As it was Garrett was actually mowing our lawn at the time that she asked. Apparently she was looking for someone to mow her lawn because the previous person had to quit due to a family emergency. Garrett had never mowed anyone else's lawn before so I asked Garrett if he was interested and he said he was so we set it up for him to mow her lawn the next day, which was Tuesday. We were able to lay the seats down in the van and have paper bags lined up for the mower to fit inside without making a big mess. After I took Nikki to work I went back home and we loaded up the van with the mower, gasoline, gloves and bags (just in case). We didn't know how she liked her lawn mowed or if she wanted the grass bagged or mulched. 

After we arrived and talked with her it was decided that we would bag the grass but we forgot to grab the bag for the mower so I had to drive back and get it while Garrett got the mower filled with gas and ready. She lives really close to us so it didn't take long. I also brought back our trimmer so we could do a little trimming as well. Garrett got going on mowing after I returned and I watched him mow and gave little pointers here and there. Since he was earning money (a lot more than he gets paid for mowing our lawn) I told him he had to make sure he didn't miss spots and to make it look as nice as he could. While I helped bring the garbage can over for him, I decided to let him empty the bag of grass into the dumpster by himself. Sometimes I tend to do too much for my kids so I stood by and watched and gave pointers when needed. It was great to be able to watch him and see how much he's growing. When we made it to the back yard I just sat at the little table and watched from afar. I let him do all of the mowing stuff. 

When he was done with the mowing I showed him how to use the trimmer. Since this was his first time trimming we took turns (I do the trimming at our house). He kind of enjoyed it though. We got as much done as we could until the battery ran out but we got most of it done. It took about 2-2 1/2 hours because it was the first time and the grass was longer because it hadn't been mowed recently. But he got it done and I told him next week will be faster because the grass won't be as long and now he knows what he's doing. He gets to mow their lawn for the rest of this season. I don't know if he'll do it next year but at least this is a good start to him earning his own money and gaining confidence in himself.

The girls don't let me do their hair very often but I decided to do something with it while Charlotte was watching something on her iPad for school on Wednesday. And it's always fun to have them match. Charlotte actually loved having her hair like this but she still prefers having it down most of the time. Alice also had her 2nd day of preschool that day and it went great. I was able to just drop off the girls and leave. I came back for Charlotte after PE and lunch were over at 12:30. Meanwhile, the boys were over at Grandma Norton's (GG's). Jack was doing chores to earn money so he can buy Garrett a birthday present. Garrett was there to ask grandma questions about family history for a school project. So I did a lot of driving around that day, lol! (To preschool, to grandma's, back home, then to preschool to pick up Charlotte, then to grandma's again to get the boys, then back home again. And then picking up Alice at 2pm)

Charlotte was drinking juice the other day and making mustaches. She would make a mustache, wipe it off, and then do it again.

There are so many days when I don't like the way I look but I was having a good day on Friday where I had some of those rare moments where I felt like I actually looked beautiful, so I took some pictures. I normally hate doing selfies because it never looks good but I think these ones turned out. And it's so important that we look at ourselves in a positive way. We get enough negative influence from the world, that we don't need to add to it. I have been trying to look at myself more positively and it makes me feel better about myself. And when I feel better about myself then I can be more positive with my kids and husband and it makes everyone happier.

Back in July we had bought Curtis's mom a glass blowing class Groupon for her birthday. I finally got over to her house about a month later to help her schedule it. They did their class on Friday 9/11. Yesterday they went to pick up their projects that they made so we made a last minute date night out of it and tagged along so we could see what they did. Then on the way back we decided to get some food and go back to their house to watch something. Three of us grabbed Subway while Gaya went to Albertson's to get fried chicken, grapes and other goodies. We ended up watching a few episodes of the Mandalorian on Disney+ because they hadn't seen that show yet. It was a fun last minute date!

Gaya's is the blue pumpkin and Steve's is the yellow and black bowl.

I was surprised to find a few pictures taken on my phone today when I didn't realize they were being taken. Curtis took a few pictures of me reading to the girls from the Friend church magazine after we got home from church this morning. He must have heard me last night when talking to his parents about how I'm never in pictures unless I specifically tell someone to take a picture of me. Nice to know he's listening 😉