Lily is 11!

It's another quarantine birthday! First was Ethan, then me, Corey and now Lily. Happy ding-dong Birthday Lily! (that's a penguins of madagascar quote)

And this year is a double digit birthday! Corey just had one of those. Lil, your next one will be at 22! Opening presents from her siblings and from Corey and I.

And I was the one that set an alarm and got up early to decorate! Go me.

Lots of our birthday box letters are ripped, I cut some new letters up this morning for Lily. I should probably make new ones. The laminated paper I used to make these letters are blue and yellow papers that, if my memory serves me correctly, I got from the discard bin at the elementary school when Hyrum was in 1st grade and I was over there volunteering.

So probably almost 10 years ago. Hmm. I should cut my own cardstock and go laminate my own letters, probably. We have a summer of birthdays coming up, so we'll see if I can get it done before September, which is when the birthday's hit pause again until spring.

Also, as I looked at this box this morning, I think we use it often enough that I should go through the effort to make this box official. No need to use a Costco box from bell peppers... I should get something legit and nice. My mom brought over an ice cream cake. We didn't want Lily's corona all over it, so we sang to her and then let her pretend to blow out the lighter.

No breathing on the cake!

Lily's friend Isa was over here to play today - They are good friends. 

 Happy Birthday to you!

So today we had ice cream for breakfast, ice cream cake for lunch, and eggs for dinner. After dinner, everyone wanted to watch a movie for Lily's birthday. They really really really wanted to watch Sharknado. Corey showed them the trailer for that last week as a joke, and now they can't stop thinking about how awesome it would be to see. "It looks so amazing! I want to watch it!" - Wes, to which Corey replied "You won't be able to get that hour of your life back..." They're ok with wasting hours on end watching pointless shows, so that argument didn't help our cause. Tonight, though, instead of Sharknado, we watched Alice in Wonderland, the one with Johnny Depp, which I think was probably equally terrifying, if not more so. Wesley might play the birthday card on Thurs to watch Sharknado. We watched a bad movie last night too - The Pirate Fairy.

Corey's plan was to keep the little kids happy and distracted with a kid movie, so we and the older kids could play a game. Peter joined us at the table, so I had to leave with him cause we didn't want to play AP Pandemic. Pandemic was a new game Corey just got, timely and relates to current events, so it sounded good, but they never got past the instructions.... so they gave up and played 5000. I came back to take a few pictures, and Corey headed to bed and I joined the game with Peter. AP 5000 isn't too hard. But the older kids were distracted by the pirate movie (made it easy for me to cheat)

Mel watched the movie via the window reflection...

The kids were amazed at the pirate fairy's strength fighting against the young Captain Hook. "Man! What kind of metal is her sword made of?!?!? It's like sword fighting against a humming bird! They've got serious skills!" They were curious at the logisitcs and had deep though provoking questions like that about how realistic and accurate the show was. It's like when Hyrum watched Leap Frog and he's amazed the Professor Quigly. (Deep thoughts there by Hyrum as Ethan set up for the Red Carpet event back in April). Quigly had so much he could offer to the world, yet he settled for working in an alphabet factory. Hyrum thinks there's a conspiracy going on there... they're secretly going to raise an alphabet army to take over the world or something.

I practiced lots of violin yesterday and today, things are going pretty good. I took lots of notes yesterday at the girl's violin lessons. I was amazed at their teacher's ability to remain calm as she teaches.

I get pretty frustrated with us practicing cause they don't care. I know it's normal, but I'm lacking on being patient as I do my best to insist on practicing and they insist on resisting.

Ethan is coming home tomorrow. Thankfully we have his bed ready. Triple bunk in Wes and Hyrum's room in the middle. We'll see if we can find a place for him to keep his clothes and stuff. He has two weeks before he starts home MTC. He did forward me an email about that, so it's official that he's not going to the Mexico MTC. We might see if an empty nester neighbor will take him when that MTC starts, cause I think there will be too many distractions in our home. Corey's dad was over here making a ramp yesterday - so that we'll be set for everyone to be able to get into the house when Ethan gets set apart.

The kids had fun helping him, watching him work, and going to Home Depot with him for supplies. Ok, going to bed and hopefully get a good start on the day tomorrow.

Peter napping yesterday, cute little guy.