1 April 2012

 WARNING: Super long post ahead.  It's been one of those weeks.   ~   The big event of our week was Gibson's 5th birthday on Monday.  He wanted a block of ice cream for a birthday cake.  He remembered the puzzle on Brandan's birthday cake this year so he asked Becky to put a tic-tac-toe game on top of his cake.

 Gibson got to have his first friend birthday party this year.  He wanted a spy themed party.  All the kids liked pretending to be spies.

For games, the kids went through an obstacle course, used clues to find a hidden bomb (a piñata), and then destroyed the bomb.   The favorite activity was building and using marshmallow shooters.

The shooters were assembled using 2, 3 and 4 inch lengths of 1/2 inch PVC pipe, connected with elbow, straight and T-joint connectors.  The PVC pipe slides together easily and the kids had fun assembling and reassembling the shooters in different configurations.

 

For some kids, using the shooters was secondary to eating marshmallows.

 

Gibson got to blow out more candles at his party.  Gibson was delighted with his birthday.  He's been looking forward to turning 5 for a long time.  He's now old enough to have monthly interviews with Brandan.  Brandan meets with the kids individually each month to talk, make goals and plan rewards.

We had the missionaries to dinner this week and Brandan taught them how to make crepes, one of his specialities.

 

This was the second week of Spring Break for our kids.  Sofi and her friends spent a lot of the week working on a movie for a school competition.  She and her friend, Joey, have been working for weeks on the script.  The kids met early in the week to read through the script and plan out how to film the movie.

The rules for the competition require the movie to be entirely filmed within 48 hours of beginning.  The kids spent Thursday and Friday filming.  You can get the general idea of the movie from the photo below.  The working title for the film was "The Taken," but after radical script changes during filming, it may need a new name.  We think the film's genre is probably post-apocalyptic comedy.

It wasn't all parties and playing the past week.  Becky made sure the kids had a checklist every day with chores, math worksheets, brain teasers and practicing music.  Our kids think they're the only ones who have to work during Spring Break.

Our week ended with our semi-annual General Conference feast, a spiritual and physical event.  Sofi combined her breakfast Saturday morning with our General Conference candy game and came up with peanut butter/m&m pancakes.  She recommends the combination.  We can't believe conference is already over.  Luckily, the talks are already available on lds.org and we can repeat all our favorites: Elder Wilson, Elder Anderson, President Uchtdorf, Elder Scott, Elder Koelliker, Elder Nelson, President Monson. . .