Party Pics

Here are the "action shots" of Cooper's birthday. He had such a good time! (a few are out of order)

Our family on Cooper's birthday.
I tried to get pictures of all of the kids with Cooper at the party. Here is my friend Emily with her kids Nikolas and Nathan.

This is Cooper and his friend Ashlynn. (I took pics of all the kids after opening presents)

Here he is blowing out his candles.

the babies playing while the kids ate cupcakes

all of the kids eating their treats

yum! Cooper was such a mess afterwards.

We did a little craft outside before cupcakes and presents.

Some of the photos of the kids turned out so cute. (Cooper and Jane)

Others-not so much (Drew and Josh in the background look cute, but look at Cooper! Almost impossible to get him to pay attention with so much going on)

Cooper and Emily

Cooper and Zach

Cooper, Ben, and Elizabeth

Jake and Cooper (this is a great one :))

Cooper and Drew

Waiting semi-patiently for presents. We had to come in to open presents because while we were all outside playing and doing the craft, Cooper decided to come in and start opening presents! He was SO excited and could hardly stand it.

Thank you all for coming to his party, we had a blast!

Decorations and Before Party Pics

So here are the decoration pictures. There are a TON because I basically am putting a picture of every decoration we had. Neither set of grandparents was able to come to the party this year and my mom told me she wanted to see all of the decorations, so, the post is huge!

Cooper had a Lightening McQueen party (the main character in the movie CARS) since he LOVES cars and loves Lightening McQueen. I had been wanting to do a car party for him all year since he likes them so much, and then with him being obsessed with this movie, it made it that much easier!

Here is the Birthday Boy waking up on his birthday! We started a new tradition this year where he has a cone hanging on his door and he gets a few small presents in it when he wakes up. So here he is about to open it. (Ignore the clothes he is wearing, we had been out kind of late the night before and he fell asleep on the way home. So he slept in his outfit. Not too cute for pictures!)

About to open his first present from us. (Our party wasn't until the afternoon and Cooper could not wait to open presents! So he opened some from us early) Amy, you asked about his hat. I didn't really make his hat. All I did was print it and cut it out. There's a website (paperandcake.bigcartel.com) that has pdf files you can buy from them, then they email it to you and you print out what you need. Lots of the decorations came from them. They had a race car themed one with invitations, a banner, hat, etc... Very cute stuff on there.

A special b-day treat-watching the movie CARS! He doesn't get to watch it very often so he was so excited to get to watch it. Doesn't he look relaxed?

We put this balloon out by the mailbox and Cooper thought that was really cool.

The party favors. I made race car crayons for the bigger kids. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be once I figured it out.

He looks thrilled to be posing by all of the decorations, doesn't he? :)

We had the first nice day all week on his birthday, we really lucked out! So that morning we decided we could do an activity outside, so we really scrambled around trying to make it decent out there.

By "3rd Ave"

Playing on our road table that morning

Marshmellow pops and CARS cookies

more posing

a close-up of the cupcakes. Some were roads and some were just green swirls. It took awhile to do the roads so I took the easy way out. (for those who are interested, the road sign suckers are from Oriental Trading)

the cutie pie birthday boy

Cooper is 3!

I'm almost done editing pictures from his birthday so I'll do a (VERY long) birthday post soon, but I wanted to post at least one picture now. This is one of my favorites from his birthday. I can't believe he is three!

Jackson's 6 month b-day

Jackson is 6 months old now! So hard to believe. He is such a snuggly and happy boy.

Some fun things about him at this age....

He loves loves loves Cooper! Cooper can get him to stop crying by just saying "sshhh shhh shhh." Jackson loves to watch Cooper and smile at him.

He has three teeth and is working on his fourth.

He loves to eat- anything, anytime. He's only had vegetables so far and gobbles them up so I'm excited to see how much he'll love fruits.

He "talks" so loud sometimes that we all look over in surprise that he could make that noise!

He's a great observer. He just STARES at you and you can tell he's thinking and trying to take it all in.

We have a wicker chest that he loves to walk up to (in his walker) and "talk" to it, smile at it, and touch it. I have no idea why! But he does it all the time.

He can have a kind of bashful smile where he'll smile really big at someone and then hide his face on me. So cute!

He likes to laugh and laugh when he is tickled.

He loves to chew on anything he can get his hands on.

He has made our lives even more complete! We love you Jackson!

Helping Mommy and some V-day fun

For the first time Cooper actually wanted to help me feed Jackson! (Only because Ben wanted to help me too). He's never asked again since, but it was cute while it lasted. Jackson will eat from anyone, as long as food is involved!
Here's Ben's turn.

Hanging out in Jackson's crib

Jackson loves his cousins!

watching daddy work outside

a few days before Valentine's Day (I know, I'm behind!) I had Eliz and Ben over while Laura and Tom moved. We did a few Valentine's activities, and had a movie night and they spent the night. It was a great time, and they actually all slept together (except for Jackson ) in the family room.

I made this yummy dessert for them. Looks impressive but VERY easy. The cup is edible and the kids were very confused by this. They ate all of the ice cream out of it and didn't touch the cup at first. I was forced to take a bite of Cooper's (such a hardship!) to show them you could eat it. Then they gobbled it up.

all the kids before our movie night.

getting ready to watch the movie.

(random picture but this is how Jackson and Cooper eat together now. So cute! Jackson looks like such a big boy now!)

The other snack that I made when the kids were over. They helped me with it a bit. It was so tasty , the kids didn't eat much of it but I sure did (so maybe I'm the only one who thought it was good??) It was those yogurt covered cheerios (Cooper calls them the pink cheerios), craisins, and white chocolate chips. Can't go wrong with chocolate!

Both of the boys had b-days recently-Jackson turned 6 months and Cooper turned 3!! So I'll be posting pictures from that soon.

Projects

I have been busy around here getting to some projects that have been on my to-do list. Some have been on there for years, literally! I don't know why I procrastinate so much, but I finally got to some of them and I am happy to cross them off.

I finally finished this wall in Cooper's room, and now I'm not sure I even like it. Isn't that great? :) I edged the blue and yellow with red and tried to make it kind of look sketched on instead of a perfectly straight line. After I did about half of it I realized I wasn't sure if I liked it, but, once you paint it there's no going back! So, I'll be living with it for awhile and trying to decide if I like it enough to keep it. At least it's done for now.


I finally made curtains for our master bath. The curtain rod has been hanging there since we moved in (almost 6 years!) so it's about time I put something there. I made it with fabric and fabric glue-no sewing. Woo hoo!

We then put curtains in the family room. Again, have been thinking about doing it for years and never got around to it. I actually bought the curtains back in October, so... more procrastinating! They were kind of a pain because I had to iron the hem into them which took me awhile to get correct (we got them at ikea and they don't come hemmed). But, one more thing off the list!

My friend Dixie gave me this idea. She made a canvas for Christmas with her kids' footprints made into reindeer and decorated it really cute so she can reuse it year after year. Since it was already Feb I decided to do that with hearts, and then I'm going to try to get going on the reindeer too. Yes, it'll be MONTHS after Christmas but I'd like to get it done while Jackson's feet are still relatively small. Another project!

(by the way, I used my new Cricut to cut out the C and J and the numbers. I'm so excited to have one! It's a very early b-day present from my parents, and I've already used it a ton. Yippee!!)

Another curtain project. Our house didn't have any curtains in it I realized! Very simple, and I used fabric glue again! I love that stuff!

Last project. Yes, they are ornaments. Again, a few months behind schedule! I was originally going to make them for grandparent gifts but seeing as it's now February, I decided to just make them for me for next year. I wanted to get Jackson's footprint when it was still small. Cooper painted the top left one. The bottom one is kind of weird, it's a mess up of Jackson's footprint that I made into a heart. I actually got a great footprint and then dropped the ornament, so I then had to somehow figure out how to make the mistake work. It's better than nothing and one more thing off my list. I love that!