2011 Week 41

Birthday week! This is the busiest, most fun week of October every year.

Sam had Friday off, so we took advantage of having the kids in school and worked had a few household projects. We cleaned up the garage and organized it completely (finally!), adding new storage for the balls, pools noodles, and remaking the bike rack. Then we got to work refinishing 3 pieces of furniture - 2 tables Sam brought home from work (they were replacing them and these have a really nice wooden top, after we got all the gun cleaning stuff sanded off of them) and Kaitlyn's old dresser. All three pieces are now looking beautiful in my (now fully functional) craft room.

Saturday was my birthday (33) and I wanted to do something fun as a family. We decided to go to a corn maze, since we didn't do anything like that last year.

We tried to pick a good one, with lots of included activities for the kids like the hay bale play area, bouncy houses, petting zoo

fair-type games, etc.The maze itself was fun. It was set up so that you weren't looking for the way through it, but trying to find 10 different checkpoints inside the maze itself. Not easy, not easy at all. We gave it our best shot but when Tyler was starting to refuse to walk by himself we knew we were done. We walked out of there having found 9 of the 10 checkpoints - not bad.

A quick drink of water and a hay ride turned Tyler into a happy kid again. He chose to sit right up front, directly behind the tractor, of course. After leaving the farm, we all went to dinner at Olive Garden, then came home for cake!

Kaitlyn wanted to do the "icing" by herself. She found it was a little too tricky to do the writing herself, so she had Sam do that, then added a border and some polka dots.

Tyler wanted to be in charge of the sprinkles. It was pretty funny to watch him try to place them one by one.

And here is their combined handiwork. At this point Tyler thought it was funny to try to grab tastes of the frosting and we didn't get a single photo of the cake without tiny fingers in the background reaching for it :)

Happy Birthday to me! It was a great birthday and I felt very well loved by all - not just my little family for spending time with me, but from a weath of phone calls and emails all day as well.

After resting up for most of Sunday I devoted a lot of the rest of the week to getting ready for Kaitlyn's birthday.

And once again there was Ty putting his fingers in where he shouldn't. I made Kate's cakes a few days ahead of time so I could freeze them for easier cutting and decorating. I went on to other things while they cooled and came back to find that Tyler had taken tastes out of 3 of the 4 rounds! Little monkey. I would have been more upset, but I knew I would be cutting pieces out of them in order to shape her cake and figured I could work around the missing pieces. But boy, I'll know to watch him closer from now on!