Birthday Bash

With Cliffton and Violet's birthdays only about 3 weeks apart, we've decided to do a combined party for them (which we did once in New York) and it was a smash!  I had a dino theme for it which showed up in the cake - a Volcano cake complete with fire (candles), smoke (dry ice), and lava (colored ganache), dino-shaped sugar cookies and some dinosaur themed games like knock the spikes down on the Stegosaurus, and feed the T-Rex, each of which were amazingly and awesomely constructed and designed by my Richard!
We rented a bouncehouse for the first time!  It was a good deal and a great party tool!  I think it was $80 or so and since we couldn't turn it in Sunday, we played with it on Sunday too and are turning it in today (Monday).  We used Plan-It Rentals to get it.  My sister Jess, my friend Hannah, and Richard were some of the adults who helped out with the food and games and then my Mother in Law was so cool to help out by bringing some snacks and then doing dishes pretty much the whole time she was here.  It was such a blessing to NOT have to turn around and spend 100 minutes or so doing dishes after the party was over.  Bryana came over at the end and we had some fun shopping together that evening for ourselves and for Richard's birthday, April 27.  He's got an expansion for Talisman, a board game.
 
So, Violet is already 5 (April 17) and Cliffton will be 7 on May 10.  I love my cuties.  They had so much fun!  Cliffton did some magic tricks for his friends and it was great to see him more confident.  He had 3 schoolmates come, neighbors and cousins.  Violet had some neighbors, cousins and friends from church.  We had 17 kids or so in addition to our own.  :)  Crazy fun, let me tell you.