It has/had been an hectic yet awesome week & weekend.

SOMEONE turned a ripe old age of 5 over the weekend, and we had been celebrating just about all week.

Earlier in the week, I had to get my "baking legs" back, and experimented with tinting some icing and whatnot, and so I used half a cake mix and came up with an Om Nom cake :)

I have never used fondant and was not about to start anytime soon, and so I did the best I could with tub icing, food coloring and decorating icing.


Birthday Celebration Part 1

Like the years before, the ladies at Bible Class helped the little boy celebrate his birthday as well.

He had decided a few weeks before, that he wanted a Mario Bros themed birthday cake, and so I started a Pinterest board to consolidate some ideas.  I knew I would have to come up with at least THREE cakes, because we were celebrating with different sets of people.

The first one was fairly easy - 2 round cakes and a few cupcakes - and a little bit of mediocre piping skills :).

The little boy was quite thrilled :)

Birthday Celebration Part 2

The next day, we celebrated with the family and some friends at Mamo's house.  It was such a beautiful day and everyone had a great time in Mamo's back yard.

 

 

 

I just love seeing Jaxon and his cousin Max together.  They are just 6 months apart, and so Jaxon loves playing with him.

As usual, we celebrated with delicious pizza from Sam's.  Mamo made some salad and Cindy brought fruit.

I told myself that I would make it a tradition to make number cakes every year as one of the birthday cakes, and so this time it was figuring out how to incorporate a Mario design into the number.

This is what I came up with.

 

I had ordered a set of little Mario figurines off of ebay, and thank goodness they got here on time.

The young cousins were also Mario fans, and so it was definitely wonderful to see the boys excited over the cake....

which, by the way, had a surprise hidden in it.

It was RAINBOW/TIE DYE cake :)




Birthday Celebration Part 3

We celebrated this one at home, with just the little boy, Daddy and me :)

I had some leftover chocolate cake mix, which I used to make mini cupcakes, and just spread icing over the top to make Toad from the Mario games.

Yes, we are now officially 5 :)

Where has the time gone?? :)

Mahjong

My family didn't play mahjong, ever.  Whatever exposure I had to it was by watching Hong Kong movies.  I DO remember ONE time, when I was very little, watching my maternal grandmother play it, when we went on one of our annual trips to visit my mom's family.

Anyway, Xiayu's parents stayed with Cindy for a few months while they were here in the States, and I got a chance to watch them play and learn a thing or two  more about the game.

Pretty neat stuff.

Wonder

Watching the sun set with my boys at the "Umbrella Park"

Way too close for comfort

About a little over 3 weeks ago, we came home from dinner, to this, in front of our neighbor's fence/gate, blocking the path and entrance to our house.

There must have been at least 10 different law enforcement cars from different counties and jurisdictions parked all over the road, blocking the way to our house, which was just next door.

Turns out, there someone "armed and dangerous" had led them on a wild high speed chase through several counties, and they just so happened to crash their truck right in front of our neighbor's place, got out of the truck and ran into the darkness between our places.

We were NOT going into our place knowing that some psycho-armed-and-dangerous guy could suddenly pop out of a closet or something.

Now that's some drama and excitement we can all do without.   

So, Jaxon and I waited in our locked car, while the hubs led at least 6 armed law enforcement officers who were in their bulletproof vests and automatic firearms, around the property and into the sheds, RV, rooms of every house, etc etc.   I mean, we live out in the country, and there is a heckuva lotta places he could be hiding.

They finally said it was safe to go back in the house, but the hubs and I spent a very long and anxiety-filled night, made worse by search helicopters that kept circling overhead.

To cut a long story short, they caught the guy a few days later - we could finally sleep easy - and so we decided to show our appreciation to the cops/sheriff's office etc.

We got donuts from George's AM Donuts, and brought several dozen to the Abilene Police Dept and the Sheriff's Office, as well as to our county's deputy.

The little boy was very excited and intrigued to meet the officers/deputies and even came away with some keepsakes!

Okay, so I didn't blog for half a month..

over on this here blog.  I DID blog some on the little boy's blog.  We have been diligently doing schoolwork and whatnot.

One of the latest books that we had been studying/reading, was Peter Rabbit.  One of the suggestions was to do some watercolor painting, as in the style of Beatrix Potter.  The little boy did tremendously.

And guess who decided to rekindle some Art-Love?  The pictures were printed from a "coloring book" website, and I just did the paints.

I tried to brighten the pictures some in photo-shop, but the colors turned out a little funky. Oh well.

None of these are excellent by any means, but my I kind of got my sea legs back with each subsequent picture, and the last one, of Benjamin Bunny is my favorite one of the three :)