April Birthdays and Easter

This month has been a very busy one with three birthdays (Mom's 60th, Shazer's 9th, and Dad's 56th), Easter, school assignments/tests, and other fun stuff. So I've been too busy doing to blog, but I now have a break for a week before my classes resume and there's not a whole lot of extra goings on so I have some time to catch up on the blogs and spring cleaning.

Not bad for 60!

April started with a big 60th birthday celebration for my mom. She had her big brother, Greg (who she hasn't seen for about 5 years), fly in to visit from Pennsylvania. Tammy, Jimmy & Jonny all flew in to the Phoenix airport, they spent the night here and then we all drove down to Tucson. Mom said it was her best birthday ever, having all her family around and her brother who was reminding her of her dad. Uncle Greg treated us all to dinner at the Golden Corral for my mom's birthday dinner, which was perfect for such a big and diverse group. Afterward, we hung out at Mom & Dad's and Mom had us play a strange twist on the white elephant game. Instead of us bringing white elephant gifts, Mom bought a gift for everyone and wrapped them all. And instead of them being funky, weird things that no one would want, the gifts were things like; chocolate covered pretzels with a gift card for $25 to Red Lobster, $25 gift card to Toys R Us, the A&E's North & South DVD, See's Candies Easter Baskets, and various other gift cards to Subway and Baja Fresh. Mom said that she wanted to give everyone else gifts on her birthday to let us know how much she loves and appreciates us. She had the person who knew her the longest have the first choice of gifts (which was Greg) and then we took turns in descending order and the usual white elephant rules for stealing and such applied. It was totally fun and our little Thwaits family made out pretty good because the kids were allowed to play, too. We got the $25 gift card to Toys R Us, one for Subway, the North & South DVD (which I'd been wanting to get for a long time and Jon picked it for me because I had already stole the Toys R Us card from Uncle Greg, which I don't think he minded) and a See's Easter basket. Thanks Mom- you rock! It was a pretty full house with everyone visiting so we did something we've never done before in Tucson- we took our kids and stayed the night at a hotel- it was nice to be able to keep our kids from bothering anyone else's sleep.

Mom and Dad with the kids

Mom and Dad with the grandkids

The next day we gave Mom her birthday gift. Jon had tuned Lyz Dorathy's piano before Christmas and we arranged to swap services and have her take some nice family photos for my mom. Everyone wore black and white and went to my mom's best friend's, Kandee Myers, house who had invited us all over for a nice Saturday brunch for her birthday. After the pictures and brunch, we went back to Mom's and played games. Then for dinner I had made a big chicken enchilada casserole and Tammy bought a big ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery (my mom's favorite ice cream place). Mom was happy to not have to cook the whole weekend. After dinner we drove back home to Tempe and Tammy & Frankie drove Jimmy & Jonny home to Santa Monica. They were able to hang out at the beach for a day and then Tammy drove back here and had lunch with us, then flew back to Denver. Uncle Greg stayed and visited with Mom until Monday. She especially enjoyed her visit with him, which is really nice because he's her only sibling and both of their parents have died. We really enjoyed seeing Greg, too, he told some hilarious stories and was a lot of fun. There are always lots of laughs when the Henderson kids get together :)


The next weekend my parents came up to Tempe for Shazer's birthday. He turned nine this year (he was a 2000 baby, which makes figuring out how old he is super easy). We just had a little family party for him this year. When I was growing up my parents had a rule that we could have a big birthday party with friends every other year on the even birthdays, ie. 2,4,6,8, 10yrs... It helped them cut the costs of having expensive parties for 6 kids every year. Of course, Tammy was the exception to that rule. She was a super party girl and if she didn't have a big party to celebrate her birthday every year then she would get really depressed, so we ended up doing a "surprise" party for her on the odd years. Anyway, we've adopted that same tradition with our kids. It turns out that our kids are evenly spaced so that this year we won't have any big parties but then next year every birthday will be a big party, we probably could have worked that out better, but oh well. Actually, I'm not big on having a big party for little toddlers/little kids, so no big parties for the girls yet.
We also have another birthday tradition from my family that we do for the morning of the child's birthday. Parents (and/or older siblings) blow up balloons the night before (after the birthday kid has gone to bed) and then sneak in the child's room and decorate their room so that as soon as the child wakes up in the morning they see the decorations first thing and feel like it's a special day. Sometimes we'll just do a lot of multi-colored balloons and other times we'll do a theme. My all time favorite was when Tammy turned sixteen and Frankie and I decorated her room with a bunch of caution tape and posters we'd made of traffic signs and even a butterscotch we'd "borrowed"(we did return it after her birthday). Frankie and I had so much fun doing it and it turned out awesome! This year I did a Japanese theme because Shazer's been so into anime and karate lately. I filled his room with red and white (the colors of Japan's flag) balloons and streamers and hung various anime and dragon (he was born in the year of the dragon) pictures I got from the internet. It looked really cool and he totally appreciated it. Shazer had his best friend, Aydin, come over to play during the day and he got to choose what kind of "birthday dinner" and cake he wanted. He chose sushi, which we actually ended up having for lunch because he wanted to be able to make it while his friend was here. Mom, Dad, and Brittany arrived in the late afternoon and we had a yummy store bought cheesecake sampler that he picked out for his birthday cake. He got some fun DS and Wii games that he'd been wanting and some nice art supplies from Tammy.

Easter morning

Sunday was both Easter and my dad's 56th birthday. We (I mean the Easter bunny) hid the kid's baskets and they were so busy wishing Pop-pop a happy birthday in the morning they didn't even remember to look for baskets. When they were reminded that it was Easter Sally and Shazer found their baskets first. We (I mean the Easter bunny) try to make the difficulty in finding the baskets correspond to their ages, the older the child the more difficult it is to find the basket. It took Shule and Brittany a ridiculously long time to locate their baskets, they seriously need to work on their searching skills. My parents went to church with us and we had a really nice day thinking about the atonement and resurrection. In Primary, one of the leaders who was raised Jewish discussed the relevance and tradition of the Passover and shared samples of the different symbolic foods they eat and talked about what they represent. Jon was shocked to see Shazer pop a big slice of horseradish in his mouth even after being forewarned. Shazer was equally shocked and horrified as soon as his taste buds registered what he'd done. Pretty funny! My dad had a nice, quiet birthday with us. Jon cooked him steak on the grill and I bought him a yummy Boston creme cake with strawberries on top. We just about overdosed on sweets with all the birthday cakes and Easter candy! Definitely time to ease up on the sweets! For more photos check here.

Sally helping Dad blow out his candles

Sally eating and making a mess of her chocolate bunny
(at least it was after church, and I washed her dress right away to keep it from staining)