Happy Birthday

We have an official teenager in the house!!  Timothy celebrated his birthday this week.  He had school, but it was an at home learning day so he got to hang around home and take it easy.  He requested donuts to begin the day.  Troy picked up some cute Christmassy ones from Hy-Vee.

Timothy planned out when to open his gifts so he could extend the fun through out the day.  In this picture he opened a Starbucks card.  

I had to go to work during the middle of the day.  Timothy could not wait until afternoon to open his gift from my mom.  He knew he had to zoom with her in order to make it happen.  He got it set up with Troy's help.  The picture below is a cute screen shot from my mom's computer.  

He opened his gift and was happy to get a dartboard from Grandma!  Troy had to pick up batteries to make it work, but they had some fun games of darts while I was working.

His Birthday dinner request was Happy Joe's.  He continues to say he will pick something else, but he never does!  This was the first time in 7 years that we did not actually go to the restaurant for his birthday.  Hopefully next year we will be back.

His cake request this year was the same chocolate with mint Oreo filling.  The decoration he wanted was the Pokémon app symbol.  Not to difficult of a picture to draw.

He did a good job of blowing out all 13 candles!  We ate our cake while watching TImothy's pick of a movie--Home Alone.  After the movie we had a couple of Pokemon Kahoots and a game of darts.  It was a wonderful day and one he did not want to end!

 We are so proud of this young man Timothy is becoming.  He is kind, generous, loyal and fun.  He has a good sense of humor and has mastered eye rolling already!  He loves video games, and most things techie.  And although he will never admit to loving family hikes he does enjoy exploring the outdoors.  Happy Birthday!

Theme dinner

 Theme dinners bring me joy! I am thankful for the chance to play with my food!  Christmas trees and Grinch fruit!

Christmas Program

We had our Christmas program at church yesterday.  I have to admit, this was just my style for a program!  It was simple and easy!!  We were zooming and retelling the Christmas story. Teresa was the narrator.  Troy was in charge of tech and worked on spotlighting certain kids.  We had a handful of kids dress up as certain nativity characters.  We had a good turn out of congregation members who hung around to watch and join in the event.  The adults and kids don't interact much anymore, so it was nice to have them together.

Teresa waiting to begin the story.

Troy tries to keep track of where everyone is one zoom and when to spotlight them.

Troy made a nice virtual background for Teresa while she narrated.

 

Birthday Party 2020 style

Like most everything this year, birthday parties look a little different.  Although, even if Timothy's friends were here in person, he would have spent the night doing much of the same...video games!  Since we are not ready to host several boys for a sleepover, we let Timothy have a virtual party.  For a couple hours on Friday night, Timothy and three friends zoomed, played a birthday kahoot, and played online video games.  He seemed to be a pretty happy boy!

Like a normal party there were gifts and treats.  We drove some cookies to his friends early in the week to enjoy at the party.  I don't think Timothy had too many complaints about the night.  Plus, he gets a sleepover next spring or summer to celebrate his birthday!  

 

Cookies!

One of my favorite parts of the year...making and decorating sugar cookies!  No one wanted to help me mix up the cookies, but I had two takers for some cookie decorating.  The kids are getting very good at decorating now and even starting to use icing bags to decorate.  It is a fun tradition each year and the results were very tasty!

 

Thanksgiving

 I feel like many of my posts this year contain something to the effect of "well this year was little different..."  Thanksgiving would fall into that to.  We stayed home this year as did most of our extended family.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.  It took some adjusting, but I think we all had a nice time.

On Wednesday we put up the Christmas decorations and on Thursday we put the ornaments on while we watched the Macy's parade.  

It was a cozy morning at home!  We also Zoomed with my family and Troy's family and played some trivia Kahoot games.  Those were pretty fun.

We tried to get a football game going, but we lacked players!  Instead, we played with bouncy balls and went for walks.

And finally we feasted on our turkey, lefse and cranberries.  We changed up the pie and had French Silk which was delicious.  There is much for which we can give thanks!

Fall hikes

With limited things we can do indoors, we have done lots of fall hikes.  Here are a few pictures from some outings...Backbone, Mines of Spain, and Bergfield pond.

 

Happy Halloween!

Halloween has come and gone along with my month of making Halloween theme dinners and treats.

Pumpkin cupcakes decorated with the limited ingredients on hand...so quite the variety of looks.

One of the best themed dinners of the season.  The pumpkin appetizer platter.

We carved pumpkins this past Monday night.  The kids helped out with scooping out the seeds.  Clearly they do not care much for the goopy parts.  Notice the gloved hands!

It took me awhile, but I was the carver for both pumpkins this year.  An Among Us imposter and a Harry Potter symbol.

Two cute kids and their finished products.

Then it was time to dress up and head out.  We let the kids trick or treat as long as they wore masks and gloves.  Timothy's friend joined him.  They were both characters from the game Among Us.  Teresa also went around with a friend.  They were Dorothy and the wicked witch.

A great night was had by all.  Oddly, it was a bit warm this year.  Not long into the night, Timothy ditched his costume because it was too hot!  He instead pinned on a no-Wi-Fi sign and wore shorts and a t-shirt.
 

Happy Birthday

 It was not quite the same sort of celebration this year.  No gathering of friends.  No dinner potluck.  No cookie cake to hand out to very eager neighborhood kids.  Instead it was a day of lots of meetings for Troy while trying to oversee at home learning.  But no matter what, it was still a day to celebrate a very special person.  

We celebrated Troy's birthday this past week with some gifts, some good meals and some singing of Happy Birthday over Culver's ice cream!

Troy had meetings until 7:15pm, so dinner for he and I was late.  That was followed by opening up a few more gifts.  I told him it was a hand theme birthday this year.  He got three different pairs of gloves (2 for biking, one winter pair), hand-dipped chocolates, and coffee beans he has to hand-grind!  

His birthday treat of cheesecake we are saving for this weekend and extending his birthday a little.  He wanted to enjoy it more when he was not feeling rushed  and stressed.  Honestly one of his biggest gifts might be the fact that some of his major workload of the last two months is wrapping up this week.  That may give him the gift of a little more time and a little less stress.  I am pretty sure he will be thankful for that.

Hopefully next year we will be back to celebrating with friends.  This year we are thankful to celebrate as a family, thankful for our health and thankful to have Troy in our lives as a husband and father.

Morning coffee and a Happy Birthday Blue bear!

Hand-dipped chocolates from Teresa!

Some coffee drinks and beans from Timothy!

Happy Birthday ice cream from Culver's!

Baptism day

We celebrated Teresa as a child of God this weekend.  We usually like to do a water activity, but this time we had lots of time with animals.  That has nothing to do with baptism, but it did make for a happy girl!

We spent the morning volunteering at Hercules' Haven, a rescue farm that had storm damage from a few weeks ago.  We mostly helped clear downed branches.  The kids also got to interact with all the animals: dogs, pigs, sheep, horses, miniature horse, goats and cats.  They were happy to help out with the reward of animals!

We were also helping care for the neighbors' cats and another neighbors' fish.  So we really did spend a lot of time with animals.

Her dinner request was brats and pretzels and a Reese's cookie cake for dessert.  It was a pretty good day for one very special girl.