Alex B-day pics.

My baby is now 4! I've posted additional pictures of his birthday cake in my previous post, but I just wanted to share a little pictures of the party.

Patty and Britt actually arrived in time for dinner and the party. Crystal and Danny came, and actually brought us dinner. If you can tell from his face, we had spaghetti. :)

Alex LOVED his cake. The first thing he did (before we even were able to light the candle, is say, "Wow!" and pop a mushroom in his mouth. He really enjoyed the marshmallow fondant the characters were made out of. He actually ate the frosting off the cake, and left the cake.

Alex received a lot of gifts, and Brenton did really good being "happy" for Alex. (Brenton's birthday is January 10th, so he doesn't have THAT long to wait for his birthday...) Since we made such a cool cake for Alex, we now need to come up with a cool one for Brenton. His favorite toys right now are Bakugans...so far I haven't found any pictures of cakes that flipped my switch. If anyone has any ideas for us, I'd love to hear them.

Alex B-day Cake Pictures

For Alex's birthday,Kale wanted to make Alex a Mario Kart cake. He did a search online, and found some pictures that I didn't think we could even come close to duplicating....but we actually did VERY well. I am quite proud of how this turned out.

We used a marshmallow fondant, which is supposedly easy to use...well, surprisingly, it is! I was so happy with how it turned out. There are a few very blatant "problems", but for our first cake, I was quite happy.

The fondant recipe I used was from this site. We used the gel food coloring you get in the wedding cake section of the store to get the bright colors. I HIGHLY recommend wearing gloves while mixing in the color.

One more plus with the marshmallow fondant, is that it doesn't taste like wax! All that's in it is melted marshmallow and powdered sugar, so you can imagine how yummy it tastes. :)

Happy Birthday Alex!!

My baby turned four years old yesterday. It's so amazing how fast time goes by!

Here are 10 things I love about Alex:

1. He LOVES to play video games, but especially Mario Kart. (And he's really good at it!)
2. He has an amazing memory.
3. He knows all the letters in the alphabet, and the corresponding sounds.
4. He can count to 30 without help, 100 with a little help.
5. He can do simple addition and subtraction.
6. He has an UGLY orange blanket that he has loved since he was a baby, and still sleeps with it at night.
7. His favorite color is yellow "just like Crystals!".
8. He loves to ride his big-wheel.
9. He still loves to cuddle with anyone who will cuddle with him, but especially with mom.
10. He is VERY stubborn. Once he sets his mind to something, he will not give it up. This can be good, but also bad.

We love you Alex. Happy Birthday!

PS Kale and I made him the coolest cake ever! I'll have to post pictures later.

Swim Lessons

We started a session of swim lessons a few months ago at the Kroc center. I LOVE how they teach the classes. (Kale and I both taught swim lessons for many years, and I'm kind of picky on how kids should be taught.) We attended the first lesson, but on the day of the second lesson, Brenton has his face biopsied and couldn't be in the water for three weeks. We were lucky enough, that they let us move to the following session for free.

They loved having the lessons, but the drive over to Coeur D 'Alene twice a week was kind of yucky....not that twice a week was bad, it's just that on the other three weekdays, I was driving over for Masters swimming. It was a long couple of months.

We would've signed up for the next session, but Brenton was scheduled to get his tonsils out, and this session, we are going to Primary Children's Hospital, so we'll miss that week, also. Needless to say, swim lessons have been postponed a few months. Hopefully in the spring we can start again.

In the pictures below: Alex is in the ugly orange goggles, while Brenton is wearing the blue. (By the way, they love those ugly goggles.)