Benton's birthday

 Yesterday was Benton's birthday.  He's been pretty excited about it coming for about a year now.  He wanted a big party with some of his friends coming over and presents and he made a list of about 12 activities he wanted to do, complete with illustrations.

I'm pretty opposed to parties for my kids.  Mostly the presents part of them.  If there could be a party where you just got together with your friends and played and celebrated being born and didn't have to have people give you things to make you feel special, that'd be perfectly fine.  I feel the same way about baby showers. Whatever.  Yes, I know I'm weird, but still.

Anyways, Benton asked and asked enough that I finally gave in and said we could have some people come over for dinner and to eat cake and ice cream with us.  In the words of Peter, "It sure looked like a party to me."  I told people not to bring anything, but I guess I should have been a little more explicit about presents.  We had dinner and the kids played and then we had cake and ice cream and the kids played and then Benton opened presents and the kids played.  I think people had fun.  We had four families, so I think there were 14 kids and 9 adults total.  We had Hawaiian haystacks, which I thought were really, really good.  Monica came over earlier and helped the kids decorate the house.  She brought all sorts of fun things.

We made the cake the night before.  I had a the brilliant idea to make an angry birds/minion/minecraft cake.  We ended up not adding the diamond pick, though, so it turned out to be just an angry minion.  I thought it was pretty amazing.  And even more amazing is that we couldn't find many pictures of an angry bird minion on the internet.  I mostly mixed colors for the cake and Monica and Peter did most of the actual frosting.  My favorite part of birthdays is still coming up with a cake to make and making it.

 Here's Benton opening his presents.  (Just kidding, it's him after he blew out the candles on his cake.)  I tried to take him aside before he opened them to make sure he was grateful and said thank you to the people who gave him the presents.  Peter stopped me and told me he had already talked to him about it.  The result was Benton grabbing a gift, thanking the nearest person profusely and then grabbing the next one and opening it.  He kind of forgot about looking and seeing what he got.  It was pretty funny.  People helped him get everything out of the packaging afterward and he did like and appreciate everything he got, but the opening was a little funny.

 After everyone left we played glow-in-the-dark ring toss and blew up the glow-in-the-dark balloons.  the kids were crazy tired, but they had fun.  All in all I think it was a good birthday.

And can I just say that I'm so glad Benton's part of our family.  He pushes lots of buttons, but he's so kind-hearted, generous and helpful and forgiving.  The other day a guy from our ward came over for something.  I asked how his wife was doing and we talked about her for a little bit.  After he left Benton went out to the garden and picked a bunch of flowers, put them in a glass with some water and said that he wanted to take them to Sister Call (the lady we'd been talking about).  I asked if he even knew who that was and he (very indignantly) said yes, she was the music lady.  So we went and gave her the flowers.  He's always thinking of nice things to do for people.  It's pretty cool.

Here's one for you

I knew we had a recent picture somewhere...

An update on the kids

**Long and boring and mostly school related.  Read at your own risk.  I'd put on some pictures, but as usual I've lost the charger for the camera.**

The kids are really fun.  I probably think that because they've only gotten into about three fights so far this morning.

Irene is talking up a storm these days.  Is it normal for a 20-month old to know the word flashcards?  She can say pretty much anything she wants to and about 95% of the time we can understand her.  Her vocabulary really is amazing.  She and Brita definitely started talking earlier than Benton and Mima.  She has pretty good grammar as well.  She also counts, or at least says numbers up to the teens somewhere.  She says pretty funny things sometimes and has a very strong opinion on many subjects that it's better just to let go than try to argue with her about.  She is obsessed with water and likes to tear books.

Mima has amazing fine motor skills.  She loves to draw and write letters.  Her handwriting sheets look as good (or better because she actually cares) than the other kids'.  She spends most of her free time drawing and coloring and cutting things--usually paper.  She likes to do math when the other kids do school, so she's making her way through a kindergarten workbook.  She's even done a few pages by herself; I was impressed she figured out the instructions.  She also started doing reading games after Benton does them, although she doesn't know her sounds as well as the other kids did when they started--probably because there are more movie choices now than just The Letter Factory.

Benton is getting much better at reading--he can sound out most words that have the basic sounds in them regardless of length.  He's also picking up other words and sound patterns.  He still has wild guesses that don't seem to be related to the sounds on the page, but he's getting better, especially when he actually looks at the page.  He's doing a first grade math book and seems to like it.  He's learning to pay attention to plus and minus signs.  He does learning games and reading games, too.  The learning games he has pretty much mastered, but it's still fun for him to do them and when he does them the little girls end up doing them, too.  He has a lot of patience for helping Irene work her way through the games most days.  He loves playing regular games.  He played an easy version of Monopoly at a friend's house one day and has loved playing it since.  He plays Quirkle and Carcassone using all the right rules.  Peter has gotten a lot of card games that the kids like to play as well.  Benton is definitely the most interested and best sport when it comes to playing games.  He is also learning piano.  So far he knows middle C, the red chord, and how to find Cs and Fs.  He's liking it, although he doesn't seem to like practicing quite as much.

Brita is working her way through a second grade math book.  She works hard at figuring out new things.  She's recently been introduced to basic geometry and is coming up on fractions.  She figured out a lot of multiplication by herself.  She does a language book, a science book, her math book, reads The Princess Academy, does spelling, and practices piano everyday.  She's really good about just starting and getting everything done most days.  It's fun to work with her.  She's getting to where she can play the piano better than me.  She likes to read and is really good at it.  She's started reading the Oz books lately.  She's pretty good at keeping her lamp, so she gets to read quite a bit at night as well as during the day.

We do hexagon time sometimes, too, where we sing songs, read books, learn scripture stories, and do activities together.  It's pretty fun.  I'm not as good about doing it everyday as my kids would like, but I'm getting better.  I recently got the books of scripture up on the wall so now we put the picture of the story that we talk about up on the book where it goes to hopefully give them some context on what the different books of scriptures are about.

I'm proud of my kids.  They work hard and they play really well together most of the time.  Benton will help with pretty much whatever I ask him and Brita has been cleaning their room without being asked every morning and night.  Better than I do, that's for sure.