What a week!

Seems like an insane blur, probably because it was. So here's a recap:

Made some last sales on Craigslist, putting us over the top for the swing set. Woo to the hoo! The family piled in the car with snacks and lemonade, headed to the lumber store and picked everything out. Hubs borrowed a truck and brought everything home. He got up nice and early last Sunday and spent the day cutting all the wood between rain showers. By Sunday night, we had a doghouse for Zoe, or the top of the playset, and that was about it.

Monday started my last week of preschool volunteering. Super easy execution, pain in the rear set up and planning.

Tuesday was Strips birthday dinner a Chuck E Cheese. Ick.

Wednesday, more preschool volunteering and Margaritas with Moms for Strip's class (LOVE her preschool!).

Thursday was a full volunteer day and we were getting carpet back in the basement. Strip's birthday party was on Friday, so I had a nice full afternoon filled with baking 48 cupcakes, assembling 25 party favors and shopping for her preschool party and the family dinner party. I

started icing cupcakes at 8:42.

At 10:00, I realized that the flood had washed away my wonderful buttercream icing recipe. Thank goodness my cake buddy lives in Alaska, so when I called her, it was really dinner time there. At 10:30, I realized that I had a giant bag of granulated sugar, not the 10x confectioners sugar I needed. Super Hubs ran to the store for me while I googled recipes and softened butter.

At midnight, I had all my little princesses

and frogs all ready to go. And no, there weren't 48 kids invited to her party. BUT, she has one little girlfriend who is a tom boy, and we knew would prefer a frog cupcake. So then I started

thinking about, "What if ALL the kids want frog cupcakes and no one wants princesses, and I only have 12 of each?!" So I did a batch of Frogs and a batch of princesses just to be on the safe side.

Friday was party day! First, we had to head over to the elementary school for Strip's kindergarden testing. With that out of the way, we headed home to clean and get everything loaded up to go to the bounce place. I called Hubs at work to make sure he was coming home. Then I asked if he was coming to the party or if he was going to stay home and work on the swing set. He asked Strip what she would rather have, and she said she'd rather have her daddy at her party than a swing set at the dinner. Sweet girl!

Once Hubs got home, we headed to the party. It's two towns over, which sounds like a road trip, but it's really only about 15 minutes away.

Or it should have been.

We were at a stoplight when some flashing light pulled out in front of us. Hmmm what is this?

Oh. It's some sort of torch relay race with 5 runners, three bikers and 2 cop cars. And where are they? Two cars ahead of us. Going 4 miles per hour. Fan.tas.tic. And 10 minutes later, while cruising in neutral, the need-gas light comes on. Yay.

We finally make it there, kids are already in their socks ready to go, so Hubs starts unloading, and I start signing waivers and getting things started. Kids kept flooding into the party room to dump shoes, so I grabbed the party hostess for a check of the head count. I had 15 rsvp's for yes with the potential of 25 actually showing up. We hit 23. Insanity!

The party went well and the kids had a blast. In an effort to ease some butterflies and tears from one of the kiddos, I kicked off my shoes and hopped into a bounce house. TOTAL backfire. The kids quickly deemed me the tickle monster and I spent the next little while going from bounce house to bounce house being attacked by 5 year-olds. We piled into the party room and

had pizza and cupcakes. Because I had enough for everyone we just let the kids pick frog or princess. Guess which one Nugget picked...I'll give you hint. He had a purple tongue after eating it!

We got home and Hubs went to work on the swing set. We were all exhausted, but started getting things together for the outdoor movie party that night. Unfortunately, LARGE clouds came rolling in followed by the threat of tornados. Awesome. We watched the doppler and finally decided at 5:30 that it was going to rain like crazy, so I started making calls.

It rained for a whopping 11 seconds at 7:04. Even though we didn't get a twister, I was kind of glad we postponed the party. It was super windy, and I'm sure we would have spent the evening saying, "Was that rain? Did you feel that?!"

So Saturday morning, Hubs was up before dawn, bundled up and hard at work on the swing set. After bringing him another shirt to layer and a second cup of coffee, I checked the temperature.

32. THIRTY-TWO degrees?! IT'S MAY! Ugh. I called to reassure everyone that the party was still on, then went digging through bags of clothes looking for anything with sleeves. Hubs put the final screw in the swing set at 7:04. Our first guests

arrived at 7:06! The party went well,

and all the kids had a blast. We set the movie up on the big screen which was awesome. The kids were sprawled out on the lawn with full audio and the adults could huddle around the fire pit with beer, wine cigars and enjoy adult conversation on the deck. Everyone left tired, full and happy, so it was a hit!

This morning, I looked out in the backyard and it looked like we had a college keg party; random hats, socks, shoes, cups and plates littered the backyard. I went to work and came home to a well-rested Strip (she apparently slept until 10 am), some sweet cards and my mothers day gift! A program for my computer that will organize all my recipes for me. Woo hoo! Now if I could just figure out how to use it.

We spent the afternoon playing on the swings. Hubs still needs to put up the monkey bars and some accessories and possibly stain it, but we still had fun on it! Even Zoe climbed up to the top.

But she was too scared to go down the slide, so she just jumped off the side of it. No more climbing for Zoe. Junebug had one titanium leg, I don't want to contiune the trend of bionic dogs in our family.