Yesterday was the last day of school for the boys and the first day of summer of fun. My husband is the cake decorator in the house. For past last days of school, he's made a sandcastle cake with ice cream cones & crushed graham crackers and a fish cake with scales made from smushed Starbursts.
Unfortunately he had to work yesterday so I was delegated the job of summer cake decorator. I made these super cute 'sno-cone' cupcakes that I saw in last month's Food Network's magazine. The actual cupcakes were easy to make. You bake the cupcakes, take the paper off of them, put them in the ice cream cups. Frost them and then sprinkle on the sanding sugar. I cut a paper plate in half to get the straight lines.
The part that was difficult was finding the supplies. I had to go to Michael's & Target to get the right colors of sanding sugar. For the ice cream cups, I searched all over before I found these ones at Jo-Anne's and even that took me a half hour before finding the right size to fit the cupcakes. I had to buy another package of larger ice cream bowls to get the little wooden spoons. But they came out so cute that it was worth it.
Here's the boys after their last bus ride together till Joe becomes a high school freshman. The middle school is right across from the end of our street which means Dan will be a walker for the next four years and Joe will join him in September 2013. I still can't believe that Dan is going to be a middle schooler next fall. It seems like just yesterday that I took him to his kindergarten screening.
In Family Fun magazine this month I saw an idea for this memory wall. In the upstairs hallway I installed three strings of yarn. Each day of summer vacation has it's own clothespin and the date on it. Right now they hold different ideas for where we might go and different things we may do during the summer. It's main purpose though is to each day put a memento of the day's activities on the dated clothespin. Could be a ticket stub from a movie, a napkin from a new resturant we tried, a brochure from the museum we went to or the score card from a round of mini golf we played. At the end of summer, we'll have a visual reminder of what we did and it'll be easy to know what we did on each day so we can make our summer end scrapbook.
After having our 'sno-cones' and checking out the memory wall with the finalized list of our 101 Summer Things to Do, the kids were off on their annual first day of Summer of Fun scavenger hunt. Another one of our traditions to celebrate summer starting. The boys love scavenger hunts and I love making them. I told the boys they were getting too old for easy clues so this year they worked together to figure out the clues. Here's some examples:
This sentence holds the key to this location. (Key rack)
Some where Buzz & Woody would never want to get stuck. (The toy box)
Where something Becca can't have gets delivered. (The milkbox. Becca's lactose intolerant.)
My personal favorite:
Whee! This is fun. (The basket that holds the Wii games & controls.)
Daniel got this one right away. Joe thought it was the slide out back. When he turned around and saw where Dan had stopped he said, "It's the slide out back." and repeated the clue, "Whee! This is fun." Then you could see the realization dawn across his face. It was priceless.
The end of the hunt is where they found their prize, brand new water guns. With those we set off to cross off the first item on our list: Have a huge water gun fight.
It was boys vs girls. Dan & Joe vs Becca and myself. Lots of fun! No clear winner was determined as everyone was soaked down to their underwear. For some reason the kids think it's more fun to have a water gun in your clothes as opposed to in swimsuits. Could it be because I am usually unhappy when they get their clothes wet?? Yeah, I think so.
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