Hope you have a Rockin' Christmas!

Love,

                              The Linharts

Rhythm

Toby came walking into the kitchen bent forward and spanking his bottom with both hands.  When I laughed he simply looked up and said, "I got a drum butt!"

Shark Party

Last week we had birthday for Noah with all the boys in his second grade class.  It was a Shark Party and we had a great time!

I sent out invitations using Pingg which I highly recommend.  They let me upload my own artwork but there is also tons of other artwork and images to use on your own invitations and notes.  This was the image I designed for Noah's party:

The day of the party we decorated with blue and green streamers, balloons, and a big inflatable shark.

We kept it simple and served pizza, juice and cupcakes.  Eleven second grade boys consumed four pizzas!

Noah decorated paper lunch sacks with hand drawn sharks and each guest's name.

Here's what we had in each gift bag.  We started collecting shark items last summer!

Auntie Em made the cupcakes and icing and decorated each one with a gummy shark. 

 The boys were fast movers and most of my pictures came out blurry.  But I think they had a good time!  We played Shark Attack, What Time is it, Mr. Shark, and Pin the Fin on the Shark as well as other party games.

The boys also jumped around with the balloons, wrestled, and were generally silly.  It was pretty funny to watch!

 When we played Pin the Fin, instead of a blindfold I covered some work goggles with paper and drew silly eyes on them.  Here's a slideshow of each boy wearing the goggles--they were such hams!

We sang a goofy version of Happy Birthday to Noah, complete with some sort of second grade boy dance.

And he blew out the candle to a round of applause. 

It was really fun and special to have Noah's friends help us celebrate him.  We're so proud of this boy and so happy that we could throw him a party to welcome him to the great age of eight!

Reindeer Food

Last year I bought these cute little buckets from the Dollar Tree intending to fill them with cookies for our neighbors.  Well, I had this little newborn at the time and it never actually happened.  But I saved the buckets and tonight we're going to deliver them to our neighbors.

Instead of cookies we filled them up with "Reindeer Food" (aka "Reindeer Poop") using the "Muddy Buddies" recipe found on boxes of Chex cereal.

We slapped a cute printed label on each lid with the ingredients and simple holiday greeting from our family.

And now we have a super cute, homemade, easy gift to bless those who live around us!

I noticed that the Dollar Tree still has buckets available and if you'd like to use the label we created, feel free to copy and paste it from the image below.  You may have to play with resizing.  Or email me and I'll send you a pdf of the label.  One batch of "Muddy Buddies" fills four Dollar Tree Buckets.