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.