Gregory Turns 6!

Last Tuesday, September 15th, my oldest baby turned all of 6 years old! It was a fun day, from breakfast to bedtime...

The night before I cooked up about 30 "kitty" pancakes for him to take to school. They ask that the kids not bring cupcakes and we wanted to do something more than just cookies. Gregory and Charla both have this obsession with cats right now and this is a beloved breakfast choice in our house.

Chocolate chip eyes and 2 drops of food coloring, run into a kitty smile with a butter knife- SO easy!


Here's video of everything to do with food throughout the day:


We are BIG Lego fans. After browsing the internet a bit to get some inspiration for a way to pull Lego's into dessert, I came up with an idea for edible Lego's that Gregory could build his own cake with. SOOO easy...

I bought one mix for pound cake (it's heavier and less crumbly than regular cake). I mixed it according to the package and then divided it into 4 bowls. Charla helped mix food coloring into each bowl.

The batter is pretty viscous, so it was easy to pour each separate cloor in without mixing them. I baked it just a bit less than the package called for. Then I set it out of the way to cool completely for the evening.

Charla had fun helping to wrap presents.

I found balloons on mega clearance so we made some fun balloon objects.

One of my favorite gifts is actually for all the kids- an art easel. Gregory got some paint and brushes and paper with it, with the understanding that it's for them all to use. Leora helped herself to the green paint in the cart before I'd even paid for it- THAT was a fun mess to clean up.

It was a fairly warm day, so I tackled the tremendous task of filling water balloons for us to ambush Fred with when he got home. The kids DID try to help. Word of advice: Fill them FULL if you want them to pop without it hurting too much. Sounds like common sense, but it took a lot of force to pop ours, resulting in some tears :/

ATTACK!!

HeeHee... this pictures cracks me up. It looks like Leora is giggling about Charla having an accident. Charla just happens to be standing where a balloon had popped and Leora is grinning for the picture.

While we let Fred go change into swim trunks, Gregory galantly insisted he take the cooler mostly full of water balloons to the backyard so I wouldn't have to. He made it 1/2 way across the driveway- such a sweetheart.

While waiting for Fred we had a nice surprise- Gregory's Primary teacher came by with a jumbo Cookie Monster cup cake for our birthday boy. She is SO sweet! And he thoroughly enjoyed it later :D

See the water balloon?

I picked up a package of primary colored fondant at Walmart and it matched the cake colors almost perfectly! While we were all in the living room, Leora snuck onto the table and picked off 1/2 the yellow fondant, so we were a little short, but Gregory didn't mind mixing colors.

I had hoped to be done and let him just build with the lego pieces, but I think he had just as much fun assembling the Lego pieces! Charla was a great helper, too.


He decided to build a sidewalk. It was fun watching him model it by walking his fingers around it.

We let him put in the candles- I hadn't imagined it would be so much fun letting him be such a participant in the whole thing.

Gift Time! He got a hoard of Lincoln Logs (YAY for Craigslist!).

I found some gently used roller blades at Goodwill. They're even extendible for 4 sizes.

My grandparents sent him a box full of the neatest miniature antique vehicles. He was delighted! He wanted to open them all right then, but Leora was pretty excited about them, too, which made the birthday boy pretty anxious.


Here's video of the gift opening. One final detail:
When helping Gregory fill out a survey about himself for school, one of the questions asked what his favorite sport is. He promptly replied, "HOCKEY." I was surprised and threw out some other suggestions. He stayed firmly by hockey. To my knowledge he's never seen a game or even a movie about it.
Our neighbor across the street is THE authority on hockey. He said he would be thrilled to give Gregory some lessons. He's pretty psyched, too :)