Howard Family, Party of 5: Jesse

Showing posts with label Jesse. Show all posts

Three Oh

That's my beloved chalkboard easel that I've had since I can remember. I know for sure I've had it since I was at least 5 years old. I took it out of the garage the other day and polished up the wood and re-surfaced the chalkboard (it used to be green....ew) because I wanted to use it to write little messages on for Mallory's party. The other side of it has a corkboard and a spot to place different jars of paint. It's awesome and I love it.

Speaking of something that's awesome and loved, Jesse had his big birthday.

He had a LOT of wishes.

We did a scavenger hunt for him (which is usually HIS m.o. for revealing gifts to people). It was nine or ten really corny rhyming clues (written by moi) leading him to his present.

Then we had visitors and more cake, visitors and more cake. We were all on a sugar high by the time we went to bed, but it was worth it. :)

wishes....

It's a little hard to make a big to-do for a birthday of someone who gets lots of glory on the other 364 days of the year....

...but it's lots of fun when it's someone like JESSE's birthday, someone who pretty much thinks about everyone else at all times.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that if I were on facebook like the rest of the world, I would post him a special message & a little picture to say happy bday:

Or if I weren't at work and he wasn't golfing, I would treat him to lunch and maybe change the cat litter myself instead of begging him to do it(a big MAYBE on that one).

Or if I secretly came into some money I would surprise him and fix his car (or buy him a new one, depending how much money I had come upon) so he could go golfing whenever he wants instead of only when someone can give him a ride.

BUT.... I am at work, he is golfing, I have no extra money and his car is still a broken P.O.S.

However me and the girls do have some fun planned for him after work/school so hopefully he will enjoy his special day.

I do love birthdays and I have so many lovely, wonderful people to celebrate and it would just be much easier if they weren't all lumped into less than 60 days.....

but if it were easy it wouldn't be as fun!!

So happy birthday to Jesse on his special day!!

Gotta ❥ these girls...

The girls all made Jesse the sweetest Valentine cards you've ever seen in your life.

Full of drawings of hearts and notes about why they love him.

Mariah got really in depth with hers and I had to share it:

It says:

Dear Daddy,
I love you very much. Thank you for buying girl scout cookies. You are the greatest dad in the whole wide world. Happy Valentine’s Day. You do so much for us. You are just as perfect as you can get. Did you know that I learn a lot from you? You are like a school teacher, except you love me and I love you.
Xoxo,
Mariah

Then she sealed the envelope with a kiss, and instructions not to open until Valentine's Day (which was the next morning):

So sweet.

I love it when the girls just go to town with stuff. Like when I don't see Arissa for a few minutes and I go check on her and she's making posters to decorate her desk or signs to advertise a new business she's starting up (baby-sitting, window washing, etc).

Or when I notice the house is unsually quiet so I go see if Mallory has put herself to bed early like she frequently does, and I find her in their "clubhouse", her sparkly markers all around her, coloring page after page with all these intricate details and pictures of things she loves at the moment (puppies, pandas, her family, school).

Or like Mariah and her sweet Valentine Card....when I handed them some simple blank cards and a sticker to put on it where they chose, and I assume they'll just sign their name and maybe draw a heart, and 5 minutes later I wonder what Mariah did with her card and I see she's still working on it, filling up the whole page with sweet words in her sweet handwriting to make something special for her daddy.

I ❥ stuff like that.

I ❥ my girls.

It's his day......

Today I'm hoping that Jesse has a very extra special

Happy Birthday!

He deserves a special day, just for him. Because the other 364 days of the year, he's pretty selfless. Always making sure what needs to be done, gets done.

Helping with homework instead of playing on facebook....

Making lunches instead of sleeping in.....

Spending 3 hours driving kids where they need to go......

Driving over to my Nana's at 9pm on a Saturday night because she couldn't figure out how to make the dvd player play. He took the child-lock off and pressed 'play'.....

Passing by the beer garden at the Del Mar Fair to go watch the girls perform instead.....

Spending money on his family instead of himself.....

Leaving work on a whim and taking Arissa her clarinet that she forgot at home......

Driving around lemon grove at 5:15am on a Saturday trying to find someplace open where he could buy a hairnet for Arissa who lost hers..... (why is she so forgetful??) :o)

Watching Sprout for our Saturday night t.v. time, cause it's what the girls want....

Drinks cough syrup and eating fish oil gummy bear vitamins, to show the girls how "good" they taste, and almost making it out of earshot before he gagged (on the fish oil gummy bears)....

Joining the Disney movie club, for the girls, instead of the Wine of the Month club.....

Making 3 seperate meals for dinner on "free choice" night, because each of the girls wanted something different.....

and doing it all happily, with a sense of humor that can't be matched. :o)

So I hope he has a very special day, and that he liked the breakfast me & the girls made him this morning, as well as the cards we made him which the girls put on his face to wake him up. :o) Life with us girls is crazy and tiring and emotional and irrational, but we are so lucky to have Jesse be a part of it and I am thankful every day.

This weekend....

....I made this:

A "ruffled neck top" with a headband to match.

I love the owl-print fabric....I want to use it for everything!

The shirt turned out a wee bit big....mostly because I rushed through the directions cause I wanted to get right to sewing & photo-taking. But that's kind of my signature-style at this point I guess. :o)

I do like the "ruffly neck" part of it:

But I think I'm going to need to tweek the pattern somehow because everytime I look at the top I think of what a fine line it is between being super cute and looking like this:

or this:

or even this:

Looks that are each fine in their own right, but not really what I'm going for with my 5-year-old couture. :o)

Mallory like it though. She sported it all day Saturday...despite the rain and winds.

....Arissa went ice skating!

Jesse went too...and he only fell once. :o) Arissa did great and only ended up with a slightly bruised knee and one record-breaking blister on her ankle. But she wants to go again so I'd say it was still a success.

......Mariah went to a Birthday Tea Party!

She'd been waiting for this party for weeks. She was so excited she wouldn't even wait for me to snap another picture!

Mariah & the birthday girl:

The sweet little dainty snacks & "tea" (apple juice) are served:

......we spent some time with our cousins!

Cousin Audrey & baby Kassadi (not pictured) were down for the day so we spent some time at Nana's to catch up with them. The girls love their little cousins...and I think the feeling is mutual.

Look at those pretty eyes!:

....It rained!

So we...................any guesses?

We baked.

.......We got to wear our new dresses!

The girls got to wear the new dresses I got for them recently (courtesy of the much-loved Macy's One-Day sale).

(Mariah isn't pictured because she had already run to the car to beat the rain that started pouring down.)

.........So that was our weekend! Minus the things I couldn't/didn't take pictures of. Such as:

~Mallory's playdate with her sweet little friend on Friday after school

~Arissa's overnight playdate w/ Vanesa on Friday

~Jesse's electrical project he's been working on for days and spent a lot of time on this weekend

~Gary's birthday party we had lots of fun at on Saturday night

~The loooong game of Monopoly we played (we let Mariah be the banker....enough said!)

~The world-wide online auction (but instead of highest bidder winning, it was first bidder) for a knitted stuffed animal being sold from a lady in London.....

that I wanted more than anything to win........

that I've tried several times before to win......

that only happens once or twice a year.....

that I enlisted the help of Jesse, Gary, & Courtney + 4 different computers for to increase my chances of winning.....

that I planned an intricate strategy for....

that I trained all my helpers on how to execute that strategy beforehand so we would win....

and still lost.

:o(

My helpers were awesome though.....3 people dedicated 40 minutes of their time to help little old me win this simple silly (albeit super duper beautiful) over-priced knitted thing that they couldn't care less about and that I could probably make myself if I had enough time and was patient enough to try. 3 people helped me try to out-smart the internet and international time zones, when they could have been napping and listening to the rain or doing anything else. 3 people whooped and clapped when we thought we'd won, only to find that when we refreshed the page, others had been able to beat us.

So I feel badly about that. I need to take them out to dinner or at least bake them cookies or wash their cars or something.

That sure was a bummer way to end a lovely, fun-filled, rainy perfect weekend.

pinwheels, hair-clips, and....Adam Lambert?

I couldn't decide what to make for the girls' classmates for Valentine's Day this year.

At first, I had no ideas.

Then suddenly I had too many, and I couldn't pick which ones I wanted to do, and which to save for next year.

I ended up doing these for Arissa's drill team buddies:

They're pinwheel pencils.

I just cute lovely Valentine paper by Making Memories into 4x4 inch squares, cut lines from each corner almost to the middle, folded one corner from each section in, and secured with a pretty pin (thru the eraser). The pins were far too long, so I used wire cutters to snip the ends off so they don't poke thru the back.

I poked myself plenty of times while making them, I didn't want any of the recipients to have to go thru that too!

For 2 super-cute drill team siblings, I made little hair clips (almost exactly like the headbands I made for my girls):

A big THANK YOU to Mallory's Sleeping Beauty Styling Head for modeling those. :o) She was a pleasure to work with....more well-behaved but not nearly as cute as the live models I usually use.

Here's how I finished up the "packaging" for the clips:

And while I was working feverishly on those, this sweet guy was being crafty himself:

He was working on a birthday gift for our neighbor, Courtney.

We wanted to silk-screen something for her, cause that's Jesse's latest acquired skill and it's pretty awesome. Courtney happens to be a fan of Adam Lambert, so we went with that.

Jesse found a photo of Adam Lambert online:

and used photoshop to convert it to black & white with maximum contrast.

Then he traced that onto a sheer fabric in an embroidery hoop.

Then (the hard part)....he used mod pdoge & a paint brush to cover the areas he didn't want to be shown on the final product. The modpodge clogs up the tiny holes in the sheer fabric, so that when paint is applied, the paint doesn't come thru in those areas.

Is that not the most awesome thing ever??

(The silk-screen, not Adam Lambert.)

After the mod podge dries, he sets the embroidery hoop on the item to be printed on (in this case, a canvas tote bag), and carefully applies paint to the whole thing. The paint comes through the open areas, and not thru the mod podged spots, and the image is transferred.

Jesse learned how to do all this by googling it. It gets really detailed, but Jesse is good at stuff like that. I avoid super-detailed things...if something takes too long, I get bored and half-ass it or just quit. Jesse, on the other hand, sticks with it and gets it done. And somehow he's got the rep for a short attention span. Go figure!

He's currently taking orders if you want Adam Lambert printed onto anything. ;o)