Medieval Times and a Medieval Birthday To Come

While we were in Texas last month, we took the opportunity to add a little field trip to our school year by visiting Medieval Times in Dallas.  We've been studying history chronologically - and if you ask me there is no other way to study history-and this year we've been going through Medieval Times.  Both kids had a blast watching the show and eating with their hands.  Mia was impressed with just about everything there and it was fun to see her recognizing certain aspects of the time period that were being showcased that we had studied.  At one point, just before the show started, everyone was sort of milling about browsing in the gift shop area and Mia noticed a group of kids in costume.  They were most likely home school kids.  One of them was wearing a Cleopatra costume and Mia whispered to me, "Why is she wearing a Cleopatra costume?  That was like, a thousand years before this."  That's a proud moment at a home school mom. When your kid knows more about a subject than most adults in the room.  Ahhh.  It feels good.

 The castle

 Papa and Nana came with us

 Some kind of Medieval torture chair.  It didn't look very comfortable

 Mia was very impressed with the King's Royal Falconer.  

 We were in the Kingdom of Navarro and rooted for the yellow knight.  Sadly, he was defeated and died at some point during the show.

 All the knights showing off their heraldry from the back

Mia was made to eat with her fingers.  She should have lived a thousand years ago.  

Mia is enjoying studying this time period so much that she had decided to have another history themed birthday party.  She really is combining a long time love of hers - fairies - with history and having a Medieval/fairy/King Arthur/Lord of the Rings-ish party.  The food should be easy enough.  And, Granmommy is going to be in town for the party this year, which hasn't happened in a couple of years so we are all excited to have her here for another party.

A Lovely, Lovely Day

This whole day was one of those days when you wake up and the birds are chirping and everything goes according to plan.  Shelby let me sleep in a bit while he made the kids breakfast and when I got up around 8 they happily threw their clothes on and went to play in the backyard/woods for an hour or so together.  Around 9:30 Mia headed to Vermont for the weekend with our wonderful downstairs neighbor (aunt) for some foodie love.  They had plans to eat at several amazing sounding local eateries as well as do plenty of walking around and some shopping of course.

Lennon and I were not going to miss an opportunity to have a fun day together!  After they left I took him out to a local bakery where I let him pick out anything he wanted.  He's been mostly gluten free for a couple of months, but for today we decided to throw caution to the wind.  He chose a delicious looking cinnamon roll with pecans and icing all over it.  When I handed it to him he looked up at me with the most humongous smile ever and said, "I feel like I'm in a book right now.  Because books are usually really exciting and right now I am just so happy!"  I think I made the right first move to get our mommy/son day off to a good start.  We enjoyed our treats - his cinnamon roll and my iced coffee - together in the sunshine just outside the bakery.

After that we dropped by the house to pick up Mateus and Bianca and then went straight to Home Depot for project day.  The kids were all very excited to be making double planters as we've been doing a lot of planting around here lately and had needed some more pots.  The planters came with stickers advertising the new movie, Epic that is due out at the end of May.  We were all equally excited about that!  After completing our projects we got some bird seed and soil and headed home.

At home, Lennon wanted to put together his Professor Bombar binoculars that were a little extra at project day.  We had fun making them and even more fun looking through them and pretending to see little tiny fairy people!

Daddy came home for lunch, as usual, but Lennon was too busy playing Mine Craft with Mateus to pay either of us much attention at that time.  After lunch Claire, all the kids, and I loaded up into the car and went to the zoo.  The zoo was great as usual.  The kids spent a lot of time today at the Dino Dig area.  While we were at the zoo Jessica called us and we all decided to have a little impromptu dinner date.  Shelby and Walderi had a wrap up event for a project they've been working on for Buffalo Wild Wings to attend together tonight, so Claire and I were flying solo for dinner as it was.

Lennon has been wanting to go out to eat sushi so badly, so I decided tonight would be the night.  We drove over to Jessica's house and walked to a great little mom and pop sushi place right down the street from her house.  All in all there were six kids and three adults.  The kids all behaved so well!  Lennon loved eating sushi.  I think he tried just about a little bit of everything.  We even tried red bean ice cream at the end of the meal.  It was pretty good!

Back at home we read a little, snuggled and he fell right to sleep.  I'm sad a little bit every day knowing that his days of snuggly tininess are quickly dwindling.  Say what you will, but I still lay down with him every night at bedtime.  He's just so precious and sweet laying there with his sweet, blonde hair swept across his forehead.  Soon he'll be big and old and he won't care about anything I say.  Today was perfect!

A funny little side note:  Lennon calls toquitos Kentucky Sandwiches.

If it wasn't for this itchy poison ivy rash all over my body, I would have absolutely no complaints about the entire day!

St. Patrick's Day

After seven and a half years up here, we've become quite fond of celebrating St. Patrick's Day.  People up here go crazy for this holiday, I guess because there are so many Irish descendants around here.  Every year we get lots of books from the library about Ireland in general, leprechauns, and of course, St. Patrick himself.  A few years ago we got an Irish cookbook that had a menu for what they called The Irish Farmhouse Breakfast.  We made it and it stuck.  Now, that is what the kids look forward to the most on St. Patrick's Day.  It consists of home made Irish Soda Bread with plenty of butter and jam, sausage, bacon, eggs, fried tomatoes and sauteed mushrooms.  St. Patrick's Day is always on a Sunday, so we spend most of the day just hanging out as a family and playing games.  The last few years, we've started having dinner together with our other neighbors who live in this house.  I always make Corned Beef and Cabbage and Claire always makes Dublin Coddle.  The kids run around together in all the green they can find.  It's super fun, and I love it especially because it's our own holiday that is not from any family tradition that either I or Shelby came from.  It's our very own.  

 I made the kids these rainbows for lunch the day before St. Patrick's Day.  I think I saw it on pinterest, but I'm not sure.  It's guacamole for grass, bell peppers and cauliflower, with carrot slices for gold.  

 Mia's clover hair do.  On the table, you can see the clover we made out of toilet paper rolls.

When Bianca saw Mia's hair she just had to have hers done the same way.  They were very cute and choreographed a dance routine for the adults to watch at the end of the day.  

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This and That

 Lennon working on his latest water filtration device.

We had a couple of friends over for a sleepover-make-your-own-pizza party

 I gave each of the kids a ball of dough and put bowls of ingredients on the table so they could make it however they wanted.  I did require that my kids put at least one veggie on their pizzas.

 Note the awesome new pizza stones from Gaga

 Lennon definitely had the most massive pizza.  He had layer upon layer of vegetable and cheese yumminess.

 They started watching a movie that I would not recommend called The Tiny Kingdom.  That only lasted about fifteen minutes before we turned it off and watched a live action Peter Pan instead.

 Ice cream sundaes were very popular

 Out of order, but here are the finished products.  The girls made their pizza stuffed crust

Mia is getting pretty good at the guitar.  She and Shelby were jamming together one day on a weekend and it was too cute not to snap a picture of.

Valentine's Day

We had a fun little Valentine's Day party this year, but somehow I didn't snap even a single picture.  It was supposed to be a short 9-11 kind of thing after which I would pick up Lennon from school and drop Mia off at a sleepover.  The sleepover was rescheduled though, and everyone ended up staying until almost 5 o'clock.  Everyone was having so much fun that we didn't even notice the time flying by.

 Mia and Chloe having a little tea while making some valentine's cards.

Here's a picture of Mia and Chloe from one of their very first play dates.  I think they were 6 years old.

 The kids holding their Valentine's doggies they got last year, waiting patiently to come down and see what loot they got this year.

This years loot

Just a Few More Holiday Pics

 Mia and Boo with their American Girl dolls and matching jambes

 Christmas morning out in the back yard in our new matching jammies from Nana and Papa.  Thanks, Nana and Papa!

 Lennon with his Contraptions masterpiece.  He's doing what he calls "In Bolting"  I'm not sure how he came up with that, but it's sort of like silly meditation.

 Mia rocking her awesome new Dallas Cowboys jersey

 Mia and Uncle Jeremy in the hurricane simulator at the Shipwreck exhibit at The Museum of Science

 The time just around Christmas was so wonderful.  We had very little to do and the Lima's had a similar schedule, so we did a lot of hanging out and playing at home.  Here, the kids are having an old fashion tea party.  Somehow I caught Bianca just at the wrong moment and it looks like she is gagging herself, but she wasn't.  These kids love old fashioned anything and tea parties.

 I believe this was our first big snow storm of the season.  The kids are going out to enjoy our new sleds for the first time

 We had a New Year's Eve party with a few friends, and this is all the kids who were at the party.  Most of these kids have been friends all their lives, or at least as long as they can remember.  Going back at least 7 years and more for some of them.

 One of our friends had a Harry Potter birthday party at our house over the holidays.  Here, the kids are at the table making "potions."

 Lennon with a giant snow ball he was making into some kind of "machine."

 Going to the hot tub at a condo in NH

 Me and my girl

Lennon playing on the lap top Holly gave him for Christmas.  Thanks, Holly!

The Holidays Part II

These pictures are totally out of order, but I'm pretty sure you can all deal with it.  :)

 Mia and Lennon came up with this ice cream pie, so we made it one day for a movie night.  It had a chocolate cookie dough crust, a layer of vanilla ice cream, a layer of frosting, another layer of ice cream, then topped off with peppermint bark chips.

 Uncle Jeremy came for a nice, long, two week visit and we luckily got plenty of sledding time in

 My kids adore their Uncle Jeremy!

 Mateus was Fritz in The Nutcracker, so we went with a group of homeschoolers to see the awesome performance

 Lennon was at school, so it was a fun little mother/daughter date

 Last year we strung cranberries on the tree and loved it, so we did it this year too.

 Gaga, Granmommy and Aunt Hillary all came in for various of Mia's performances.  When Gaga was in town, we went out to a cute little tea house for brunch one morning while Lennon was at school.

 In front of the Wenham Tea House

 Chloe and Naomi are two of Mia's best and longest friends, and they both came on the same night to see her as Sophie in Auntie Claus

 The cast of Auntie Claus went out to get frozen yogurt after their last show

 Mia got an incredible amount of loot from all her doting fans

 We had a movie night with Gaga and Lennon insisted on having me build him a "boat" to view the movie in.  We took a laundry basket and filled it with cozy blankets.  I also put a soft, blue blanket under him as the water.  He was in heaven!

 Lennon was having a hard time getting along with the older kids at a party we were at, and so he decided to lay down.  As you can see, he was pretty tired, as he fell asleep right in the middle of the party.

 Making reindeer food for Christmas Eve

 We went to Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum set in the 1860's, for an event they call Christmas by Candlelight.  We had wanted to do this for a long time and it was super fun.  

 This is a silly little video Mia made of herself

 One of the projects at Christmas by Candlelight was to make these little Cornucopia tree ornaments

 Lennon and Zebree with the reindeer food.  Zebree came with us to look at Christmas lights on Christmas Eve.  Our tradition is to put out the reindeer food, drive around and look at lights while drinking home made hot chocolate and then come home for some take out Chinese food.  This year we did things a little bit differently because Holly had given us an awesome gift card, so we ate out at a Southwest restaurant called Masa.  

 Mia delicately sprinkling reindeer food

 Our favorite, crazily decorated house

 The kids and I made gluten free molasses cookies this year for Santa.  Lennon didn't ask any questions about why we were making them gluten free, and later that night I got some cookies!  

 No fire place?  No problem!

 Lennon has been wanting his own baseball cap for a very long time.  He was thrilled to open this one from Gaga

 Mia and Rebecca in their brand new matching pajamas, robes and slippers.  Thanks, Gaga!  

 Holly came up around mid morning and we exchanged gifts with her.  The kids love their adopted Aunt Holly.  She gave Lennon an old, no longer used laptop which he was pretty stoked about.

 Christmas breakfast: Super Berry Coffee Cake, bacon, sausage, coffee and orange juice.  Perfect!

Lennon has built quite a few towers at this point with his Contraptions kit.