Craziness

Henry has had some pretty serious melt downs lately.  These can come from anything including when I cut his strawberry wrong, when I drew a wrong line on a picture we were supposed to be drawing together at school and whenever I refuse to dress him and undress him like he can't do it himself. Yesterday I was driving in the car and during a calm moment we had this conversation...

Mom: Henry, what I can do to help you to be happier and not freak out so much when things go wrong?
Henry: Well, I was thinking...if you just give me what I want every time I want something I will always be happy!
Mom: You know I can't do that Henry.  What if we always talk nicely to each other and work out problems together when things go wrong?
Henry(very seriously): Mom, I just don't think I can do that because I'm crazy.  I just keep getting crazier and crazier and I just can't stop the craziness. 
Mom: (laughs out loud and starts getting seriously worried about when baby #3 arrives)

Well, if any of you can help me "stop the craziness" I will invite any suggestions.

Shark Party Details

Ok, so I realize that Henry's Birthday party was over a month ago but if you can believe it, only yesterday did I just finish scraping the last window that I painted with glue and poster paint to look like an aquarium with sharks swimming around.  I wanted to have his shark party at the zoo, but that would have cost 500 dollars just for the space so I made my own aquarium with the many windows in my living room complete with over a hundred balloons covering the walls to look like the water.  

This party was pretty much out of control and whenever I don't blog about something ever(like my trip out to the NW by myself for two weeks while I was in my first trimester of pregnancy=exhaustion) or very late it means that it's taken that long to recover or it's just a blur from being too tired.  Some details of the party include...a total of 45 people in attendance, a really cool shark pinata filled with 20 lbs of candy and probably weighed more than Bea, singing the jaws song, playing pin the fin on the shark, reading a book about sharks, playing shark attack with a giant shark balloon to the theme music of JAWS which really scared some of the kids.  It really makes you realize how music influences how we feel.  Some people deny it but you can't deny a two year old who has never seen JAWS freeze in absolute fear after hearing the movie theme music.  We, of course, ate a ton of really yummy food that included shark cheese crackers, shark shaped sandwiches, three types of seafood dip with crackers and a giant fruit salad.

 

 The highlight was, however, the cake, which I painstakingly made over two days time.  I tried to copy another woman's cake on this awesome website but my perfect shark head coming out of the water turned into a super scar-faced shark with a collapsed mouth. No one noticed though and the kids all loved it.  It was also pretty scary!  The bottom of the cake was the most delicious cake I've ever made though which was a whole wheat version of this dulce de leche cake.  Best cake I've ever made and possibly ever eaten.  I also made my dulce de leche from scratch using a real vanilla bean and milk(as opposed to using a can of sweetened condensed milk), and that took three hours in itself to make.  I highly recommend it.  

After the cake we watched Henry's 4th Birthday slide show which was the best yet and he still wants to watch it over and over again.  I did it to one of my favorite Coldplay songs, "Death and all of his friends," which seems like a weird song title but I didn't even know exactly what the words were until I uploaded it for the show because they're almost inaudible and most of the song is just an instrumental, and a really fantastic one at that.  Anyway, the show was great and I know those slide shows make Henry feel really special so I'm going to keep doing them as long as I can manage.  I'm getting faster at creating them anyway. 

Henry then opened all his presents which were mostly transformers and other action figures.  He really needed some age appropriate toys since everything we had was either baby oriented or just blocks and puzzles.  He really loves his transformers and he and daddy spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to transform them and they also love playing with legos together now too.    

Henry still tells everyone, especially complete strangers, about his shark party. The best part about it was that we were able to coordinate it with Gammie and Grandpa Hohl along with favorite aunt Courtney(she chases the kids for hours on end) who helped out immensely.  I couldn't have pulled it off without them unless I had woken up at 4 am to get things started that day.  Thanks to everyone who helped out and who came to the party! I hope to never do anything that crazy again.

The New Neighbors

These last few days Henry has gotten the idea into his head that he has to make a present for our new neighbors.  If you haven't been keeping up, we haven't had very good luck with our neighbors.  Henry has pooped and peed on our neighbor's deck, the YW scared our other neighbor half to death playing hide and go seek, we got in trouble playing in our other neighbor's yard, etc. etc. I have felt kind of bad because we haven't even gone over to meet our new neighbors yet so when Henry said he was making a present for them I was thinking that this would be a great opportunity to formally meet.  He worked for three days drawing, coloring, and writing at least 20 different items. He wrote "I (heart) you neighbors" and "welcome neighbors" and of course wrote Henry all over everything.  He traced his hand a foot on at least half of the papers and if you see him you will notice his fingers and toes outlined with blue and green marker.  He put them into a giant box and I made some meyer lemon squares to go along with the strange gift.  We've been busy over the last few days so every night he's been disappointed that we haven't gone over there so this morning at 9am he convinced me to let him go over there to deliver the box.  I was SURE they wouldn't be home at that time so I let him go over while I stood in our driveway.  He rang the doorbell and looked back at me saying, "I'm going to wait for a long time mom".  After about one minute I said, "well, it looks like they're not home so we'll come back later." That's when he proceeded to open the front door, which was unlocked for some reason, and he poked his head into their house and yelled, "Hey, there's a package out here for you!"  Then my poor neighbor, in his underwear, came to the door saying that he had just woken up and thanked Henry for the announcement.  At this point I was in shock, hands over my mouth, at what had just happened, totally embarrassed, I yelled back that Henry had actually made that for him and that I didn't think they would be home and that I was really sorry.  I asked him if we could come back later sometime and he said to come back at 10am.  We went back and guess what? No one answered.  Big surprise.