Happy 12th Birthday Emily!

Emily turned 12 today!!! We have celebrated with her all weekend.

Yesterday, she wanted to go to Cheesecake Factory for lunch with the family.  We had twelve people go to lunch with us. She got a lot of fun presents. You can tell in the picture below that she was pretty excited. 

After we ate our lunch, the waiters brought out an ice cream sundae and sang Happy Birthday to her. 

The bakery ladies decorated her cheesecake with chocolate sauce and sprinkles. She got the salted caramel cheesecake. She said it was really good. 

Noah and I shared the Oreo Dream Extreme Cheesecake. We both liked it, but it was pretty sweet for me. 

Today, Emily invited a few friends over for an ice cream sundae party, but only her friend Haylee could come. They still had fun though. It's just really hard to get people together for summer birthdays. Everybody is always on the go. 

We had chocolate cupcakes and neapolitan ice cream with all the toppings. We had caramel sauce, hot fudge, marshmallow sauce, chocolate chips, mint chocolates, cookie crumbles, pretzels, mini M&M's, and even gummy bears. And of course we had whipped cream and cherries. Is it a sundae if you don't have whipped cream and cherries?

I got these cute little ice cream cone bowls on Amazon.com. Aren't they cute? They come with little spoons, too.

After the girls ate, they went out to bust the pinata. Actually, it was a pull-string pinata. Emily went first and picked the right string on the first try. Since there were only two girls, they both got A LOT of candy. They also did some Perler bead crafts and painted nails outside on the back porch.

And after the party was over, little brother came home and got to have an ice cream sundae too. He was more than a little upset that he didn't to attend the all-girls party, but maybe someday he'll understand. 

Emily,

You are growing into such a smart and beautiful young woman. I'm so proud of you and I can't wait to see what the next twelve years brings for you. Enjoy every minute!

Love,
Mom

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Growing Up

My Emily is growing up. Can you believe it? Does she not look 17 in this picture?

If you read my last post, you already know that Emily's hibiscus bloomed for the first time today. I showed it to her when she got home and she was really excited. She calls the plant "Hi-Be" and she takes care of it herself. 

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Emily's Salt Dough Map

A few weeks ago, Emily's class made 3D salt dough maps in class.  We had to make the salt dough at home and send it to school in a plastic baggie and provide the pizza box and supplies to decorate the map, but they did the rest of the project in class.

Salt Dough Recipe

4 cups flour

2 cups salt

2 Tbsp cream of tartar

1 1/2 to 2 cups water (add a little at a time until it's the consistency of Play-Doh)

Mix together the dry ingredients then add the water a little bit at a time until the dough is the consistency of Play-Doh. Don't be afraid to use your hands. Knead for a few minutes until smooth. 

I told Emily that we could whip up this dough really quick with the Kitchenaid mixer, but Emily said that her teacher said to mix it by hand. Okay fine. You can do it by hand, too. 

I thought Emily's map turned out GREAT! I was really impressed with it. She decorated it with acrylic paints and labeled it with a Sharpie marker. 

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How to Make an Edible Animal Cell Cake

Several weeks ago, Emily had the opportunity to make a cell cake for extra credit in her science class. It could be made of any food as long as it was all edible and large enough to feed half of her class.

She chose to make an animal cell cake, which is round. We did a lot of research on the internet to get some ideas for what to use for different parts of the cake.

Emily wanted to look like the cell was cut open so we baked one cake in a large round baking pan and another cake in a large glass bowl to make a dome for the top of the cell. We cut off some dome cake so that we can add in all of our cell parts. 

Here are the items we used for different parts of the animal cell:

Yellow frosting - Cytoplasm

Orange frosting - Cell membrane (add red food coloring to the yellow frosting to make things easy on yourself)

White candy melts - Ribosomes

Airhead Extreme candy belts - Golgi body

Large round lollipop - Nucleus

Sour gummy worms - Rough ER

Red Mike & Ike - Smooth ER

Orange frosting - Nuclear membrane (put some frosting in a plastic baggie and snip off the end to pipe the frosting around the nucleus)

Red gummy bears - Mitochondria

White jelly beans - Vacuole

If you try it, let me know how it goes for you.

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Frontier City Field Trip

Today was field trip day for Emily's class! They went to Frontier City, which is a local theme park. I went along as a chaperone.

There were 7 girls in my group. We all had a good time. One of the hardest things was trying to keep up with everyone when some girls did not want to ride the same rides as the others. 

I took quite a few pictures, but I don't have permission to post pictures of the other kids online so I had to crop some of them out of the picture. 

One of the rides we found was The Tornado, which is the Tilt-A-Whirl!  I rode it twice. I think Emily rode it three times. I love that ride. It was a lot of fun. 

Some of the girls were wanting to ride the Silver Bullet, which is one of the big rollercoasters. We headed over there and when we got close we realized that the line for the ride was very short, in fact non-existent. It took me a second to figure out what was happening, but the ride had gotten stuck at the top and the fire crews were there rescuing people off the ride!

They were like 80 feet up in the air or something crazy like that! The news helicopters were circling overhead and broadcasting the rescue live on the TV and internet. It took them about 2 hours to get everyone off the ride.

Thankfully, none of the kids from our school were on the ride at the time and everyone made it off there safely.

Since we were not able to ride the Silver Bullet, we kept walking and eventually found the water rapids ride. We got sooooo wet! I guess that's the point of the ride, but it was cold out there today and we were very wet. But this amusement park has a full-body heated dryer that you can pay to use. We all get into it together and tried to warm up a little bit. When I got home a couple of hours later, my clothes and shoes were still very wet. 

It was a good field trip and a lot of fun. I hope it's something that the kids will remember for a very long time.

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Honor Choir

This spring, Emily tried out and was accepted into the Honor Choir at her school. They practiced after school one day per week.  A few weeks ago, they had their Honor Choir performance at the local high school. The performance included Honor Choirs from all the elementary schools that feed into our high school.

We were sitting up in the balcony during the performance and I couldn't get any good pictures. This was the best I could do. Can you find Emily? She's on the back row.

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3rd Grade Math Carnival

One night last week, Emily's school hosted a 3rd grade math carnival.  We all went and played lots of games.  I am going to let Emily tell you all about it.  She is going to be my guest blogger for today!

~*~

Hi everybody, it's Emily.  On Wednesday I went to a Math Carnival! I played lots of games. This is me when we were getting out of the car!

I will tell you the easiest game.  It's called the cupcake walk. It is when she turns the music on and you walk in a circle of chairs. On the back of the chair is a picture of a cupcake and a number. When the music stops she calls a number in the tens place or other places and if you have a number you get a cupcake!!!! I got a chocolate cupcake with pink frosting with brown sprinkles.

The hardest one is called straight shooters. It is where you have three marbles and throw it on the number chart and you have to add up all three numbers.  Then you have to multiply that number by three!  My three marbles landed on 27 every time. That is hard!

There was also a Estimating Station.  You had to go around the table and guess how many items were in each jar. They had a jar of mini marshmallows, one with M&M's, cheese balls, gumballs, Twizzlers and other things.  You write your guess on a piece of paper and they told us the winners the next day. I won the jar of cheese balls!!!!!!!!!! I guessed 500 cheese balls and there were really 530.

This is me with my cheese balls.  Want some?

I had so much fun at the Math Carnival.  I saw a lot of my friends and the games were fun. I love my new school!

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Thanks so much to Emily for guest blogging today.  She also got her progress report on Friday and she has all A's!  We are so proud of her and love her so much!

Well it's a rainy Saturday at our house.  It's hard to want to get up and do anything when it's rainy and chilly outside.

Have a great weekend!

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