High Five!

It's Karston's birthday!

We had family over for grilled dinner. For dessert, I tried to make Lady Liberty Cupcakes, but my decorating skills (and supplies available at the store) were not all the way up to the challenge. Still, chocolate cake in ice cream cones (about 1/3 leaked) with chocolate icing and vanilla cream sugar wafers (sprayed with orange and yellow decorator's spray) doesn't taste too bad! Note, red food coloring will not make red icing, so I decided chocolate was a better color (and flavor) than pink.

Our neighbors with two girls each about a year older than our two boys came over. We had moved the craft table downstairs, and the kids spread out with crayons, paper, and stickers. They decorated slide whistles, colored then assembled pinwheels, and assembled stars-and-stripes airplanes. What fun! Then Karston's friend from preschool, Zach, came over with his family, so we started all over again with crafts.

And if that weren't enough fun (my kids were getting very worked up), then we went outside to watch our neighborhood fireworks over the 12-acre lake! Wowie! Zowie! Ka-pow! 1300 pounds of fireworks, an outdoor stereo system around the lake, a week of preparation from a team of volunteers, and safety precautions everywhere. Impressive display. The other kids didn't want to go home, and our kids didn't want to go to bed. Eventually we will get to wind down, I'm sure.