Gifts for the Grandparents

For the second year in a row, I made calendars for the grandparents and great-grandparents using Walgreens.com. I have been very happy with the quality of the photos and durability of paper on these calendars. This year I even made one for us to keep. :) If you decide to use Walgreen to make a calendar, I would wait until they offer a discount since they do this pretty often. I saved $27.00 on five calendars.

Snow in Texas??

I never would have thought that I would see snow in our neck of the woods, let alone on Christmas Eve. The day before we were playing in the yard in our t-shirts. It was truly a Christmas miracle. Diego has only seen snow once in his life and this was the first time for Mateo. It was not a lot of snow compared to other places in the country but we could not have been happier!

Toys my children ACTUALLY play with.

The boys received a TON of cool toys and games for Christmas and for Diego's birthday. I think that I have plenty of material to keep the Toys my children ACTUALLY play with posts going for a few more weeks. :)

I asked for help with choosing games for preschoolers a couple of months ago and Danita From The Land of Pleasant Living wrote an awesome post about her children's favorite board games. Following her recommendation we purchased the game Zingo and we all LOVE it. It is recommended for four years old and up. Basically each player gets a card and similar to Bingo they must try to match up the tokens to the items on their cards. Each token and card shows a picture of the object and the written word. I like this feature because both pre-readers and readers can play together. I think that I will use this game in the future to practice sight words in English. Which brings me to my last point. This is an easy game to play in Spanish or any other language if you just call out the objects in that language. For example, when we play and I have a cat on my card I call out "gato." This would work for any bilingual family to practice vocabulary in your second language while having fun.

Do you have some toys or gifts that your child received that you would like to share? Here's the MckLinkey. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with your families!

Feliz Cumpleaños a Diego

This week my "baby" boy is turning four years old. I love to celebrate his birthday but I have a hard time seeing him grow up so fast. I remember the week after he was born being extremely emotional and at one point I was crying (again) because I realized that he would go off to college some day and leave home. Now I am not (nearly) that irrational but I do sometimes wish I could keep him little and innocent. I know that is not possible so I just try to appreciate every day that I am lucky enough to spend with him. He is such a funny and caring little boy and I just love him so much. Ok, I will stop before I start crying.

Since my family is in town for Christmas we have had a small birthday party for Diego a couple of days after Christmas for the last two years. We are thinking about a new plan for next year since this is overwhelming for all of us. We have not decided what that will look like but we maybe doing a half-birthday party in the summer.

Here are some pictures from our Pirate party:

First, the pirate ship cake. I can not take all of the credit for the idea for this cake. After I decide the theme for my kids' parties, I head over the the Coolest Birthday Cakes for ideas. Real moms submit photos of cakes that they have made to share with the rest of us. For my cake I used two chocolate sheet cakes stacked and cut in the shape of a ship, Rolos in the wrappers for the "gold," Rolos out of the wrappers for the "portholes," Whoppers for the "cannonballs," chopsticks for the masts, Lego pirate men, shark and treasure chest, coconut dyed blue for the "water," and crushed graham crackers for the "sandy island."

I ordered the pirate hats, sticker sheets to make treasure maps (seen below), the small plastic treasure chests (shown above) and gold coins from Oriental Trading. Two of the activites of the party were making the treasure maps and then a treasure hunt. The treasure hunt was basically the kids using the treasure chests to look for gold coins that we hid around the house. I would have liked to do it outside but it was very cold.
We did venture outside to break the piñata. Dale, Dale, Dale..... My in-laws always buy the piñata. This year it was a huge pirate.
Overall the party was a success. Diego was happy and that is all that matters. Later when I put him to bed, I asked him his favorite part of the party and he said that it was his cake. Did I mention that I love that kid? :)

Exhausted

We just celebrated Christmas and Diego's fourth birthday party in the last three days so I am exhausted. Both turned out great, but I am exhausted. Did I mention that I am exhausted ?? I can't wait to share pictures from both but today my plan is to get my house back into some sort of normal and REST! If you would like to know some the fun ways that we celebrated Christmas in our house this year, check out the article that I wrote for Spanglish baby about our bicultural traditions. If you already read it..... THANK YOU!

Feliz Navidad- Graham Cracker Houses

We are not huge fans of gingerbread over here so we decided to make our "gingerbread houses" out of graham crackers. They are also much easier for little guys to help with.

First the kids laid out the pieces to icing and decorate with candy.

We laid the pieces out to dry for a little while and then we constructed the walls and roof using massive amounts of icing to hold it together.

Diego and his cousin and very proud of their houses.

Mateo didn't get to help building them because we purposefully waited until he was napping to make them. Luckily his big brother and cousin were nice enough to share.
Feliz Navidad

Early Christmas Present

My husband finally finished the Lego Table that he built for the boys. I am very pleased with him because instead of the spending $100+ dollars to buy one like we had planned to, he made this one for under $30. Diego already knew about the table so we decided to make it an early Christmas present and distract him from his constant "Is it Christmas yet?" questions. It has already provided HOURS of fun. Thank you, Papi!

These are a couple of cars that Diego built that day.