Birthday Weekend and More Fun in the Ashes!

What a weekend! The entire family is freshly showered, three of us are in bed and two of us are sitting down with our feet up to relax for a minute.

Let's start with the fun stuff. Yesterday we had a birthday party with Shawn's side to celebrate Little Miss Vi! She wore her gray and red ladybug dress with the silver sequins and she loved all her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle decorations, presents and cake. A HUGE thank you to Shawn's mom and sisters who did all the cooking for the party! I know, how lazy of me not to do any of it. But man, did I appreciate it! It was so such a fun party and a great day.

Violet got some awesome gifts - I hope to get some photos up this week so you can see them. The cutest little Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pillowcase for her bed and a messenger bag/purse -- made by her grandma and aunt Sandy. FOUR handmade dresses by aunt Denise! I am so excited for her to wear the dresses. They are so cute. Following lunch, birthday cake and presents, we all worked on sewing projects for the afternoon.

I finally made Bo's zipper pouch that he picked out fabric for in January. I have a picture of it, too. It was fun to make and I hope to do more.

Oh! I almost forgot -- Friday night we had a super fun night at aunt Sherie's house. The Cyclones lost but it was a good showing and a fantastic year. Way to go, Freddy and team! And thanks to Sherie and Steve for another great Friday night with the kids -- all three love going to their house.

And now, today's update. Shawn and Violet went for groceries this morning while Mr. Maze and Mr. Bo helped me clean. We started with the bathroom. Mazy scrubbed the toilet and Bo scrubbed the sink. You're welcome future roommates, significant others and spouses. :) Then we worked in their bedroom. Then we tackled the downstairs. By noon we had it looking pretty good.

Mom came over at 1 to wrangle kids so Shawn and I could hit the garage fire inventory. We worked for 5.5 hours and we made a good dent in it, but we're far from being finished. We did, however, get all the books photographed and written down. There were hundreds of them. And I found box after box of all my scrapbook supplies and a couple more albums. Man, I don't even want to think of the money tied up in those boxes. Hundreds of dollars -- mostly Creative Memories brand that isn't making any of that stuff anymore. Mom took home two big totes of it and offered to sort through it and inventory it for me. Thank you, Mom!

We worked until 6:15 and realized we were starving. We pulled together all the boxes we need to save -- we found two plastic totes filled with dishes that are unharmed. Hooray for that! Mazy was so anxious for us to get to the Lego totes. We found one of them, but the totes on the bottom of the pile are huge fused blocks of plastic. We can't even pull them apart to see what was in them. We're going to have to go back through Christmas and birthday photos and see if we can piece together all those toys. The fun never stops with fire inventory. :)

Well, I need to do some research tonight so I better get at it. I promise to get photos up this week. By the way, today's weather was great! Sunny and warm, a bit overcast later but I think I might have gotten a sunburn on my neck! Even though that's bad for me, I was very excited for it to get that warm! Have a great week, everyone!