Big Bro's 6th Birthday Party

Big Bro turned 6 at the beginning of February. We had a Star Wars Lego themed birthday party at our house on a Friday evening. Big Bro came home early from school with a fever, but after a quick trip to the doctor to confirm he was not contagious, we powered through with the party that Big Bro had been highly anticipating. 

Desserts: Big Bro chose Rice Krispie Treats over cake. We also had brownies, Paleo brownies and Paleo cookies.

Food: Pita Pizzas (that Nicholas cooked on the grill pizza oven), veggies, Yoda watermelon, and chips and salsa.

Activities: Defeat the Clone Army, Jedi Training (with pool noodle light sabers), coloring and Duplo Building.

We hosted about 10 families for 1.5 hours. Everyone was gone by 7:30. Big Bro opened his presents and crashed!

The Aftermath:

36

Nicholas turned 36 on February 2nd. We had dinner at Mandola's with his parents and grandfather. They left after dinner, but we stuck around for bocce ball and delicious gelato!

Friday night we had a date night thanks to Grandma and GranBo at a Dell Children's Trust event. It was a wonderful evening, and a much needed night as adults.

On Saturday night, our neighbors came over for dinner. I made Nicholas a carrot cake birthday cake. It was delicious!

Dell Children's Trust: Red Wine and Cardiology

At the beginning of February we enjoyed the Dell Children's Trust Red Wine and Cardiology event. We enjoyed learning about the Heart Forward campaign to build a Heart Center at Dell Children's. We also enjoyed a date for Nicholas' birthday, some great wine and food!

2017 Goals

I have never really done New Year's resolutions, but over the past few years I have tried to set out some goals. It looks like I didn't make any goals for 2016, so I can't review those here. Maybe I was overwhelmed with adding a third child to our lives. Now that Baby Bro is 6 months old let's talk about goals for 2017.

1. Eat Out Less. Cook at Home More. This is not really a goal we hope to achieve, since we really need to do it. In order for this to work for us, we really need to meal plan, and use all the groceries we buy. We have been working on this for a couple months, and it is going pretty well. It's time consuming because I like to make yummy food.

2. Fully clean the kitchen once a day. Since we use the kitchen for three meals a day, it seems to always be dirty. We have a never-ending pile of travel coffee cups, water bottles and lunch containers that need to be hand washed and take forever to dry. It drives me crazy to have dirty dishes all the time, but it also drives me crazy to have a dish drainer full of dishes with water bottles sitting next to it trying to dry! I'm trying to get the kitchen cleaned at night. Big Bro is becoming a big helper in the kitchen and can unload the dishwasher now.

3. Keep more current on blogging. I currently run about 2-3 weeks behind in blogging. I would really like to be more current so that the witty thoughts in my head make it onto paper. Also, once I am so far behind, I feel like I lose some of the passion for writing about events, and since I'm blogging for my kids, I want them to have that passion from me!