Easter 2011

Easter this year was spent in New Jersey at Pop and Nana's house.  It turned out to be a beautiful weekend with gorgeous spring weather on Easter Sunday and we had such a nice time visiting with family, partaking in the Easter festivities and, most importantly, celebrating Jesus' resurrection!

Below we are doing the annual ritual of dyeing Easter eggs except that this year we are dyeing them Star Wars style.  I picked up a Star Wars kit at Target that was a huge hit with our little fanatics.  Oh, how wrapping pastel eggs in Yoda shrink wrappers could enliven two little boys" holiday so much more! :)

Abby, all smiles with her favorite Poppy and Nana!

I love my sister!

After all of the excitement of the day, the Easter Bunny came while the little ones were all sound asleep...

Here we are, all dressed in our Easter finest, enjoying some time with Pop, Nana, Uncle Mike and Aunt Chang before heading home in time for our evening church service where we had even more fun with some of our friends, celebrating the rebirth of Christ!

Our prettiest little Easter girl with her huge hair bow.  Love her :)

The usual sibling picturre as of late:  Abby looks beautiful, Nate looks bored and Ben looks constipated :).  Nate's practiciting his James Dean look for when J. Crew calls him to model some of their kid clothing in all of his rugged, 3 year old masculinity :)

Our family of 5, doing the blue and purple thing :).  I just love me a good color-coordinated family picture :)

Poor little Natey had a rough few days of no naps....here, he (and Daddy) are taking a rest after brunch while watching sports. 

Finally, it was so much fun to see Uncle Mike and Auntie Chang for the day!  Our newest cousin is only 3 months shy of making his appearance and we cannot wait for next Easter, when he will be here with all of us :)

Two boys, Two bikes

You start to think that certain things are the norm when you have an extremely cautious child like Benjamin.  Such as being terrified of even getting onto a bicycle until he is over 4.5 years old.  But once he did, he took off and now loves riding his bicycle.  In fact, he loves it so much that after having his first bike for only a year and really only riding it for a few months in the fall, it was time for our tall boy to get a new bike that was more size-appropriate now that he had gotten over his fear of the big and scary 12" monster.

Enter Natey, the three year old who will try so many new things (as long as it doesn't involve eating it!) and strives to do anything that his cool big brother does.  So, what a surprise when I glanced out my kitchen window one afternoon to see him riding Benjamin's old bike across our driveway, never having had a single lesson at all.  He just took off and has not looked back since.  Benjamin's old bike has now become Nate's bike and because Ben only had it for such a short period of time, it looks brand new.  Ben now rides a bigger bicycle that he got for his birthday this year, which will hopefully last him for a few more seasons. 

So below are our two boys, spending a sunny afternoon in their regular fashion: riding bikes together on the driveway, having a great time at it!

So Grown-Up!

At nearly 18 months old, Abby has become quite the little fashionista.  She loves helping to pick out pretty skirts and dresses to wear and especially enjoys searching through her hair "pretties" for something to put into her locks.  She just adores my shoes and handbags and we will frequently catch her trudging across the room in mismatched shoes from my closet.  She is such a girly girl, as any daughter in a houseful of men and boys should be :).

Lately Abby has been getting into playing dress up, espcially when some of the "older" girls from church come over to play with her.  She has a full fan club of 5-9 year old girls :).  Here, Abby is playing dress up with her eight year old friend, Regan.  This lovely ensemble, however, is all Abby's own doing; she watched Regan get dressed up and then once everything was back on the floor, Abby picked it up and started to put it all on at once.  Doesn't she look lovely, purple fur wrap, mardi gras beads,  floral flapper hat and all?

IVNS Goes Bowling

Benjamin's preschool class took their second fieldtrip this spring to Earl Bowl Lanes for a morning of bowling.  Since bowling is one of my true loves in life and something I really, truly excel at....I begged and pleaded for Andrew to take the day off and go on the fieldtrip with our guy :).  Once he found out that some of the other dads were also going, he was looking forward to the outing even more and was excited to have some father-son time with Benjamin.

This was Benjamin's first time bowling and he really enjoyed it. They had the bumpers set up on the gutters so it was a great and encouraging first experience for him.  Andrew was looking into options for joining the bowling league with Ben by the end of the day, reliving his youth :).

Here's Ben in action...wow, these balls are a lot heavier than our Little Tikes one at home!

The final scoreboard for Andrew and Ben's lane.  Obviously, they are the bottom two names.  Of course Andrew was the winner and Benjamin bowled a decent 68 for his first ever time at the sport.  Hey, that's better than I probably would have done if I had come instead :).

Happy Birthday to Ben and Nate!

It's that time of year again in our house: March, otherwise known as "birthday month" around here.  Both Ben and Nate celebrate their birthdays this month and we start hearing about how they celebrate their birthdays in March several months earlier :). So, the inevitable "no-day-all-year-is-better-than-this" event starts gaining excitment soon after Christmastime from two certain little boys. 

This year, our theme for the boys' birthday went without question: DINOSAURS!  They both just love these prehistoric beasts and I guarantee that they can beat anyone in a Name That Dinosaur contest.  It may not be quite as humbling as challenging them to a game of identifying road construction trucks by brand and official name, but it comes close.  Especially when these huge words roll so easily off of their little tongues.  Veloci-what?  Yes, they know.  What-osaurus?  They'll correct you.  So with that, the theme for our party was formed and I just had to work my magic and come up with some fun invitations.  Voila! Here's what we ended up with:

Tyrann-o-saur Ben is turning 5!

Nate-o-saurus is turning 3!

Hope you can come to our DINO-MITE party.

Join us Saturday, March 19th

If you don't it's a crime.

'Cause we're going back to the Land Before Time.

The party's at our house.  It starts at 3:30

We'll be digging for dinos and you may get a bit dirty.

Erupting volcanoes, cake, fossils and more.

Please call us today and respond with a ROAR!

So, yeah, we had some fun activities to live up to now that they were in print hanging on people's fridges.  This wasn't going to be a neat party, that's for sure, but the prospect of bringing the dinosaur hunt inside sounded like so much fun to us.  The house can always be cleaned, right?  Just as long as the kids all have FUN!

My parents, Uncle Mike and Aunt Chang and 4 families we are good friends with joined us for the day and it was the perfect number of guests.  There were 12 children, 3 of them being babies around Abby's age.  All of the kids were able to particpate in some of the activities and they all seemed to have a great time with everything. 

You are now entering the Land Before Time...

The boys wanted to set up their library of dinosaur books in case anyone wanted to look through them.  They love reading their dino books before bed at night and have quite the library!  They did make good props even if everyone was too busy to browse through them.

Look!  A pteranodon left an egg for each of the kids to bring home.  A papier mache egg, that is, stuffed with party favors from behind...

Of course the boys each needed their own birthday cake.  Nate wanted the green stegosaurus and Ben wanted the orange triceratops.

I built a real volcano for the centerpiece and here it is stuffed with the faux smoke.  Later on, we'll remove that for some entertainment.  To be continued....

We played Pin the Pteranodon in the Air, which unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of since I was running the game.  The main excitement was in the three activity stations we set up for the kids to try their hand at being archeologists.  This is where the party gets really messy....

Each child got a bag in which to collect his/her findings.  And out to the digging fields we go....

First comes the Dino Dig.  Here, the kids got to dig through sand to find fossils, shells, coins, dinosaurs and bones.  Ask me about making homemade fossils.  I'm an expert now :).

Next the little archeologists got to make some fossils of their own to bake and bring home.  With the help of Play-Doh molds and some plastic dino friends, we had lots of different fossils made by our little experts.

Finally, our paleantologists could go to the Chip Away to break away pieces of the block and reveal hidden treasures.  Yeah, this proved to be a lot more difficult that it appears so luckily we had several dads on hand to intervene.  To be continued as well....

Annnnddd....they're off to dig and chip away for treasures and to make fossils....

That's my girl....Abby was totally turned off by all of the gritty sand and dirt.  She'd much prefer playing dolls or dress up like her mom :).  What is this stuff, Mom??

Real men use real tools to reveal hidden plastic dinosaurs :).  Yes, crowbars, mallets and screwdrivers eventually did the trick and the kids had fun chiseling away the plaster once the block had been warmed up....

Look at this guy, always the little heart throb!  He stayed in the Dino Dig the entire party and even opted to skip out on opening his gifts so that he could go back and play in the sand.  I think he was excited at the prospect of Mom letting him play with sand in the house, if you ask me :).

The continuation....we took out the faux smoke and set off a real erupting volcano for the kids before we ate dinner.  They loved it!  Ben told us that it was his favorite part of the party!

Dinner is served.  I separated the "Herbivore" dishes from the "Carnivore" dishes so that the plant eaters could migrate to one side of the table and the meat eaters on the other :).  Our menu consisted of:

Dino Nuggets

Brontosaurus PB&J sandwiches

Dino Dig Jello cups

Pteranodon Hot Wings

T-Rex Nest Candies

Velociraptor hardboiled eggs

Lava Punch

(and some boring sandwiches and Caesar salad for the adults) :)

The gang!

Everyone loved digging the plastic dinosaur out of their cup of Jello, even Abby!  It was seriously the most exciting feat of anyone at the party when they finally revealed their prehistoric friend from the depths of their orange Jello.  Nate was the first to do this; ironically, the one who usually doesn't like Jello.  He ate it to his heart's content with the goal of digging out that dinosaur.  I should bury toys in his meals more often. Hmmm.....

The Savignano gals :)

Cake time!  I think the boys are enjoying themselves, don't you think?

How old are you, Nate?

THREE!!!

I'm FIVE!!!!

In case you forgot already, I'm THREE!!!  Nate asked me the next day if he was still three :)

Finally, that night after everyone left and all of the fossils and dirt had been washed away in the bath, the boys opened some of their family gifts.  Of course Miss Abby got a gift from Pop and Nana, too.  Wouldn't want to leave out the princess when it's not even her birthday, right? :)

Dresses!  I LOVE dresses much more than sand, Nana! :)

Happy 5th birthday to Benjamin and Happy 3rd birthday to Nate!  We love both of you dearly and are so blessed to have you as our two sons.  You make every day worth living!  XOXO

Love, Mommy and Daddy :)