The Kiddos Lately

You'll recognize some of these events from Papa's camera.

Another Trip to the Beach!!

It is miserably hot here again this weekend - up in the 90's I think.  Anyway, no fun to be outside... unless you're outside standing in the ocean.  So V packed some lunch stuff and we loaded up the car with an embarrassing lot of stuff and headed up to Jacob Riis Park again.  Oh, but before we did that, V emailed our friends Serena and Josh (parents of Gabrielle) and invited them to join us out there.
Serena and Josh invited Molly and Chris (parents of Theo M. and Benny) and Tal (father of Hiyuli), and suddenly it was a big beach party!!

Not much to explain here.  Just some nice pictures from a nice day at the beach with a lot of people we like.

Sadie's Fifth Birthday!

As anyone lucky enough to be included on the mailing list for the blog knows, Friday was Sadie's fifth Birthday!  Our girl is growing up very quickly.

In honor of the occasion, we all went out to dinner on Friday night to Sadie's favorite restaurant, Blue Ribbon.  It isn't so much that Sadie has a favorite entree at Blue Ribbon as the fact that all kids meals come with a HUGE banana split (which Sadie gladly splits with the rest of the family).  So that was nice.

On Saturday, we hosted Sadie's official birthday party.  I can't take credit for any of this.  V came up with everything.  Having learned our lesson last year about inviting everyone, V asked Sadie to pick 4 or 5 kids she wanted at her party.  Sadie picked a group of girls from her class.  V then came up with a completely homemade craft-oriented party plan and Sadie loved it.

Sadie's chosen guests were: Ori, Tamar, Hiyuli and Dami.  Ori and Tamar both moved here from Israel with their families in the past year - both speak Hebrew and are learning English, but they are learning it fast.  Hiyuli's parents are Israeli as well so she speaks Hebrew at home, but she has been speaking English for longer and her English and Hebrew are both excellent.  Dami's first language is English, but she seems to speak excellent Hebrew as well.  And, as you might know, Sadie has been in a dual language English-Hebrew pre-school program for the past two years so she speaks and understands Hebrew very well also.  So, there was a lot of Hebrew spoken at this birthday party.

All the guests showed up right on time at 3:30, put on their smocks and jumped right into the first craft activity: painting big papier mache letters of their first initial.  It was immediately noticeable that each of them took a completely different approach to the task and each of them was completely intensely focussed on their work.

This is Ori.  She painted her letter with large stripes of color.

This is Tamar.  She painted each facet of her letter a different solid color.

There was some discussion of technique around the table.

Sadie painted her letter in a fanciful but organized array of colors with polka dots running around it.

Hiyuli painted her letter all yellow.  She used up the yellow paint but was undeterred and would not hear of adding another color.

Dami was much more free form in her painting, but equally intense, turning the letter to choose the exact right spot and angle for each color.

The next craft was sun prints.   Each girl placed little objects on a sheet of light-sensitive paper and then went outside and set it in the sun for two minutes.  Then they watched as the prints developed in cold water.  No photos of that activity.  

The third, and most involved, activity was tie-dyeing plain white t-shirts and leggings.  We showed them their basic options for ways to tie the cloth for different effects: spirals, dots and shibori (stripes).  They all chose the style they wanted and we helped them twist and scrumple the shirts and leggings and twist on the rubberbands.  Then they got to work with two dozen colors of dye.

Ori did a combination of dots and general scrumpling.

Tamar went shibori all the way.  She was meticulous about not leaving a single spot of white showing as she applied exclusively red and blue dyes.

Dami was the only one who had done this before and she went with a spiral on her shirt and shibori for the leggings.

 Hiyuli did both her shirt and her leggings in twists and polka dots - then proceeded to dye them all yellow!  Surprise!

Sadie did her leggings in shibori and her shirt in twisted dots.

Anyway, all of them came out great and the kids loved it.  I'm hoping we can find an occasion to get them all together in their brightly colored outfits for a photo.

While they waited for us to clean the counter for the next activity, they all raided Sadie's costume box. 

That's the birthday girl as Unicorn.

 The final, and most important activity had each kid decorating her own cupcake with a wide variety of candy sprinkles and decorative toothpick ornaments (bunnies and flowers).  V gave each kid a watercolor tray with the various sprinkles in each bump and they got right to work. This was probably the most relaxed of all the activities because there is really no wrong way to adorn a cupcake since it's going to get eaten all up no matter what.

When they were done decorating their cupcakes, we lit the candles on Sadie's big cake (which V made and Sadie decorated the day before).  It was a crazy looking cake, but DELICIOUS!!!

This expression is, of course, de rigeur before blowing out candles.

So, yeah, a good time was had by all.  Even mommy and papa enjoyed ourselves.

If you're wondering where Sawyer was, he was out having a rollicking good time with a babysitter.  Don't worry though, he got home in time to celebrate and have a piece of cake with everyone.

And after everyone went home, Sadie wore all the decorative streamers around for a bit. 

Great birthday party!!  Great kid!!  GREAT!!!