Reasons to Celebrate

Just so you know, there are a lot of links in this to other posts I've written, mainly because this post is about celebrating and I like to blog about us celebrating.



We Telfords like to find reasons to celebrate. Jeremy's been working on a whole calendar of holidays for every day of the year. Some of them are more well known and you might see them on a wall calendar, such as Groundhog Day, and some of them are a little less well known and you might just hear about them from people celebrating, such as Talk Like a Pirate Day. And sometimes we just celebrate something that is special to us. But we love reasons to celebrate.
This week we celebrated two special days, President's Day and Jeremy's birthday.

For President's Day, we helped Nichole practice knowing what values coins had and who are on the coins (and some of the paper bills). We even taught them a little bit about some of the past presidents of the United States. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt's head is on the dime because he started the March of Dimes. Did you know that? At one point I asked the kids to each get a teddy bear out so we could talk about the teddy bear being named after Teddy Roosevelt. Nichole grabbed one that belonged to me, but Jr. couldn't find one very easily. Our sweet hearted daughter handed him her special Build-A-Bear bear and said he could use her. That was such a sweet thing to do. She was definitely praised for that and her little brother was so grateful.

The kids enjoyed playing a game we found from FamilyFun magazine. We had a container floating in a tub of water and the kids tried to throw coins in the container (though they got a kick out of it when it splashed in the water, too). For a little more education, before they threw the coins they had to tell us the name of the coin and which president was on it or how many cents it was worth.

I even got a blurry picture of the first toss that landed in the container and not on the floor or in the water. In my defense, I was holding the baby at the time, but you can still see the coin in motion just before it landed in the container.

click to see it larger

Then the kids made sugar cookies with Daddy (which we'd been meaning to do since Valentine's Day, but hadn't gotten around to it yet).

For Jeremy's birthday, the kids wanted to know what theme the party was going to be (see, our kids know how we celebrate), so Daddy suggested it be balloon-themed. Worked for them. So that morning he made balloon animal shaped pancakes for the family.

He also pumped up a couple round balloons for the kids to play with. And he baked his own birthday cake and put frosting and candles on it (he said because that's the age he acts). But the kids did put the sprinkles on.

Even though Jeremy did so much of the work on his own birthday, I did make his birthday dinner. I never got around to making a balloon sculpture for him for his birthday, but he was happy with the present I got him.

At one point he needed a nap, but that didn't stop the kids from sharing the cards they made for him.

He did enjoy his birthday.


So there you have it. Some of our reasons to celebrate.