Chickens

Here are the girls in early July. We are down two. Now we have 10. We did get two free though, so that is some consolation. We got our lesson in naming food. Not a good idea. We were sad Mama Fluff-ruffle got eaten. She was an Americana with distinctive markings. The Australorpe is hard to distinguish from the others and had no name and so we were not as sad.......   No more naming work animals!  A weasel got in and ate two of them. Our two "defender" chicks got it, I imagine they were protecting the rest. Someone will have to take over. They are getting so big and feathery..........hoping for eggs in a few weeks.

Book Character Birthday Party

Well, Olivia turns 11! WOW! We celebrated with her friends last weekend. It was a fun book character birthday party. I am going to write this up in case anyone is interested in doing one of these.
Everyone came dressed up like a book character (we choose children's classics).

 Olivia is Repacheep from Narnia and the boys are Wee Feechies from the Wilderking trilogy (ok, not a classic....YET). We also had a Persian Princess, Lucy from Narnia, a fairy and a mouse from the Rescuers.

I made a birthday cake that was two books stacked on top of each other. It turned out well. I used a boxed chocolate cake, a stiffer cake would work better. The butter cream frosting worked well, stiff enough to hold.
We also served slices of ice cream on which the kids used Alpha Bits Cereal to write messages. That was fun and they liked eating it, but not the best idea in the world. Alpha Bits cereal is hard to find. In our city Walmart, King Soopers, Safeway DO NOT carry it. We had to go to Albertsons to get it. Not one of those anywhere near us. Yummy buy though.

We played some fun games.
First off we mixed it up by guessing what book character was taped to our back.
Then we sat around and introduced the character we had come as and a little about the book. I had the kids share what they liked best about that book or character.
We got a few new book titles to go check out!
Then we played a game of Children's classics trivia. That was a bit long and there are so many books, not all the kids had read them. It might be good to pick a couple that you know they read at school or summer reading books. Trivia game can be viewed with this copy and paste link below if this link does not take you there: link. And our invitation should be one of them.
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-obhHD6VxLWOGQ5MzcxMjctMzIxNC00MmYzLWEwMjMtZmI5ODYwZjZhYjAz&hl=en&authkey=CLjv2fsP
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=143WS6OrIueEzZf48q4F-k8UtLZnMm-Tt6hxRyFmM6to&hl=en&authkey=CPiY5dAI

Then we went downstairs to make a beaded ribbon book mark. And play a game of build a castle out of books. The kids did a good job. This one was the most tall castle like.
Then we had cake and ice cream, opened packages and enjoyed a fun mixed up story. We used the Mad-Lib's idea with the story of Cinderella. You can do this with any storybook. I suggest using a Little Golden book version of a classic and substituting words (names, places, items) for a funny twist on an old familiar. 

The girls then did a play acting of a classic story all mixed up called Fractured Fairy Tales. This needs some tweaking before I can actually post this game.
The girls received a book for their party favor. You can buy a bunch of the same one or a variety of bargain books that are actually good. We went to discount shelves at Big Lots, Barnes and Nobles, Borders and Mardel's Christian Book store.  And, of course my daughter insisted we pass out candy as well.

All in all it was a fun party and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and go home happy.

Poor Jigs even got brought into the action as Aslan from Narnia. He hated this dress up and he ran and hid under the bed when it was time to put it on. Then he moped around while it was on him.

Fun times.