Summer Break: The Last Week

Summer is winding down and school starts up again tomorrow. We had a tremendous amount of fun this summer, but I think we're all ready for the routines of the school year. Will put it perfectly last night when he said he was feeling nervous, excited, happy and sad. That's back-to-school in a nutshell.

Our last week of summer break was the perfect mix of busy and relaxing with a good sprinkle of celebrating too (Will turned nine this week, after all!).

Here's a peak at some of what we did:

Cub Scout Doughnut Ministry at church

Cub Scouts is one of our favorite things about the school year!

Building, building, building! Gene and Will made a robot spider and a model airplane this week.

We visited the science museum in Sugar Land.

And we volunteered at the food bank again. We were repackaging goods from massive boxes into banana boxes and then sorting goods by category.

Will spent Friday afternoon at a friend's house, so Henry and I headed out for some fun of our own. We ate frozen yogurt and played games at Chuck E. Cheese. Henry won 100 bonus tickets while playing Doodle Jump!

We headed to the zoo on Friday night for their Cool Nights. Unfortunately, it poured right after we arrived, so we really only ate dinner and saw a couple of animals.

Rainy day zoo visit

Good-bye, summer 2015! 

Water Balloon Monsoon

Our Cub Scout pack held its annual Water Balloon Monsoon on Sunday afternoon. We missed it last year due to our vacation, but we figured it was a not-to-miss summer event this year. What's better than a water balloon fight with a huge group of rowdy boys in the middle of August? Sign me up!

The only daunting part was the thought of filling up 100 water balloons for the boys. But then we heard about these magical bunches of balloons that fill 40 at a time and seal themselves.

We bought two different brands on amazon. These multicolored ones are Magic Balloons. They were just okay.

We also had green Bunches O Balloons. They look great in the photo but started to leak and deflate immediately. Bunch o' wasted money, that one is.

Contemplating the deflating balloons.

Water, water, everywhere...  just not actually in the balloons.

After surveying a cooler full of half-deflated and quickly leaking balloons, Gene hand-tied the few that were salvageable and then we borrowed an actual working kit from a friend. We set up our cooler down on the "big kid" side of the field and the boys divided up into teams for the battle.

My boys really wanted to be together, so they settled on teaming up with the younger kids.  

Unfortunately, that meant leaving our cooler of half-filled water balloons on the other side of the field.

For some reason, leaving our balloons perturbed the boys, though I can't imagine why. We mostly left the bigger boys with a cooler full of water and floating balloons while we "borrowed" properly filled balloons from other Scouts.

Splashed!

We ended the afternoon with pizza and popsicles just before it started raining.

And with that, our summer Scouting events are over. And we have a full year before we even have to think about filling 100 balloons for another water balloon monsoon.  

9

Will turned nine years old yesterday! We started the day with birthday muffins and lots of presents.

We asked Will what he wanted to do on his special day, and originally he had a detailed adventure involving three museums and lunch out...  only to realize that he had a stack of new toys and games to play with and he'd rather spend the day at home. We pushed our museum visits to another day and spent the day relaxing and playing and enjoying the time at home. Our big outing of the day was going to a toy store to spend a birthday gift card and picking up cupcakes at Crave.

This boy loves his new origami book from Gramma and Grampa.

Origami tulip.

Will was born at 3:05 in the afternoon, so we made sure to watch the clock and take a selfie as our big boy turned 9!

Dinner out is a special birthday treat. Will chose Tokyohana and ordered sushi (including salmon roe, which he loved!).  

At home, we had Crave cupcakes waiting for us.

Happy birthday to this sweet, smart, funny boy who made me a mom nine years ago. 

We love you so much!

Will's Ninja Birthday Party

We celebrated Will's ninth birthday Saturday with a kickin' ninja party. Will had been talking about having his party at Laser Quest, and I thought this might be the year that we move the parties away from our house -- but at the last minute, he decided he'd really like to have a ninja party at home. So a ninja party we had!

You might recognize the invitation from Henry's ninja party in March. The best thing about repeating a theme for a party is that most of the work is already done. We did tweak the activities quite a bit and this party was even better than the last.

Ninja invitation

Welcome sign

Birthday banner

The first activity was finding your ninja name, Will was "Meikitatakikarin" and Henry was "Rikutoshifu."  

Gene is always such a sport to dress up and lead all our party activities. In his introduction, he told the boys that he was a lawyer by day and a fearless ninja warrior (Jikutoku) by night and that he would be leading them through ninja training. The boys had to learn six ninja virtues: patience, dexterity, focus, agility, logic and speed before taking on the final task of fighting the evil floating ninja head and earning their ninja swords.

To learn the ninja virtue patience, the boys worked on origami.

Next up, to work on dexterity, the boys had to find a ninja toy hidden in a bowl of popcorn and pull it out using chopsticks.

The focus challenge was knocking down paper tubes with rubber ninja stars.

The agility challenge was an obstacle course. 

Ninja Will

Ninja Henry

They had to steal a cup from an unsuspecting citizen (our good friend Matt was perfect for the role!).

One of the hardest challenges was logic. The boys were given a code and had to crack it with no clues. I loved watching them run around the house, trying to find a clue. They considered a mirror image, a number code, and even using the ninja name chart as a decoder. Will suggested that it could be a shift code and then they took off from there, with one kid writing down the shift and the others helping figure out the code. It was a true team effort and it was fun to see their brains working.

The cracked code: "You are almost a real ninja."

 The final outdoor challenge was speed.

The boys had to run from the back wall to the fence while four adults threw balls at them!

I love Will's face here!

The final test was defeating the giant evil floating ninja head (ie, pinata).

 

The boys did so well with all the challenges and they all had such a good time. After all their hard work, it was time for snacks. I didn't get a good picture of the snack table, but we had sushi (California rolls), edamame, ninja swords (large pretzel sticks), oranges, chips, and cupcakes.

The happy birthday boy.

I can't believe Henry stayed in costume the entire time. It was so hot!

Nine (almost)!

After cupcakes, the foam swords came out and there was a brief battle in the backyard before our friends departed. Will opened his gifts and got lots of cool games, building toys, experiments and more. 

In the end, I am so glad we decided to have another party at home. Will's ninja party was awesome from start to finish!