Kate is 5!!!

I'm sufficiently embarrassed that this post took so long, but I'm catching up a little at a time since our trip! Kate turned FIVE YEARS OLD a couple weeks ago, and since we spent her birthday in Utah, we had a family party for her there. We went for a "Tangled" theme since we had this awesome pond to work with. I'll get to that later. Also since we were staying at my parents' [primarily unfurnished] house in Midway, we had to get pretty creative with our limited resources when it came to throwing a fabulous birthday bash. For instance, check out the cake:

My mom and I whipped up this little number using borrowed cake and cupcake pans from the neighbors, cake mixes and canned frosting, and decorated it with pretzels, graham crackers, mint leaves stolen borrowed from our other neighbors and - that's right - those are garden peas, which we stole from Tim (who was out golfing and therefore couldn't object). Pretty creative, right? We were proud of ourselves, all things considered.

Peas on a cake...? I bet that's a first!

Okay then we made these little "boats" (get it?) - and we had APPLES (I was trying to tie everything in to the movie in some way)

And... pizza. That's totally unrelated. I just really really love pizza.

ACTIVITIES:
First, we braided the hair of any little girl who was willing. (The top picture is Kate post-braids.)

Then we took a few buckets of sidewalk chalk out to the driveway and let loose! (In the movie Rapunzel draws with chalk, or paint, or whatever, on the ground.) Then the girls wanted to dance around the sun drawing in a circle. So we did.

{Brooklyn's I LOVE U - sometimes when you're working in large-scale it's hard to get things in the right order...}

Another fun thing here was that my brother (who is a very talented artist) started drawing ambigrams of all of our names. That's where the word reads the same right-side-up or upside-down. For instance:

Are you seeing it?
Go ahead. Turn your computer screen upside down.
AMAZING, right???
I think he did everyone's name, even the hard ones like Sterling which I thought would have been impossible. (Oops it appears I didn't get a picture of Sterling's. It was awesome.)

[That's Krista, Tim, Erika, Travis, and Chloe, if you needed help with those. I'm sure you didn't.]

Whoa, that makes my head hurt.

Where was I? Oh yes, back to the party!

The pond. I know you were waiting for this one. So the whole Tangled theme idea came from my friend Karen telling me about her sister's incredible birthday parties, including a Rapunzel one where her sister actually put the kids in a boat on a pond and they launched floating lanterns. WHOA, right? Can you imagine a more incredible 5th birthday? So when I realized we had a little pond behind my parents' place, AND I have two brothers working at Outdoors Unlimited at BYU who get FREE rentals of any kind of boat, raft, canoe, or kayak you can imagine, well... the wheels in my little "somehow-I-must-bite-off-more-than-I-can-possibly-chew" head started turning. I was so excited about this idea! Then... I started thinking about the last time we put Kate in a boat. And then I started thinking about the possible combined drowning AND fire hazards we could face. And THEN I thought about being arrested for starting the largest wildfire the Utah mountains have seen to date. And then I quickly scrapped the floating-lanterns-launched-by-children-who-were-coerced-into-getting-in-a-boat idea.

Instead:

I grabbed some large sheets of colored paper and taught everyone how to fold paper boats. Okay, you will not believe how many times in my childhood/first-grade teacher/mommy career I have used this skill. I learned it when I was little, from a Curious George book. If you don't know how to make these, you should learn. Fast. I promise it's one of those skills you never realized you desperately needed. Like Morse Code.

(Kate got hurt. :( But this is her boat.)

After we had a good fleet of colored boats, we nestled a tea light in the top of each one, lit them, and launched them in the pond. The effect was really charming, although it obviously would have been better at night. Unfortunately, though, in summertime it doesn't get dark until like midnight, and little kids (and parents) had a bedtime to stick to!

It seemed like all of our plans were going well, but it turned out our efforts to avoid potential drowning hazards were soon to be thwarted. As we were all watching the little lantern boats, my little 16-month-old nephew Austin couldn't keep away from that tempting body of water any longer and dove in! I think there was some screaming (coming from me) but thanks to the quick rescue efforts of two of Travis's brothers, Austin was quickly pulled out to safety! Needless to say a large-scale change of clothes (and quick load of laundry!) was in store. Oh, and a community bath.

Wait a minute, it looks like Austin was the only little one who DIDN'T make it into this tub! Hm.
(Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures after the pond incident.)

So that was the PARTY, which took place the day after Kate's birthday. (I guess I'm kind of working in reverse chronological order here.) A complete synopsis of Kate's actual birthday is coming up next, which was a day pretty much just as fun as this one! Though it admittedly involved less cake, chalk, games, candles, and near-drowning incidents.