The Richards Family Fairytale: February 2013

I am full of great ideas, but Hannah had an even better one. Somehow, and this probably shows I don't monitor my kids Internet use closely enough, Hannah discovered baking shows on the Internet. She loves them and quickly learned she loves to watch people make cupcakes. So once she saw this "Rainbow cupcake" idea there was no question we would be making them, after all she now knew how. So with every dish I had, 2 boxes of cake, more food coloring than you should eat in a year, and one HUGE mess we had Rainbow cupcakes. And they were wonderful.

Somehow, and I sill cannot believe this, I have an 11 year old. It does not seem possible that 11 years has passed but it has. We let the kids pick where they want to eat on their birthdays and for the last 4 or maybe 5 years Austin has picked the Olive Garden. This year was no different, only there is no Olive Garden here is Charlottesville. So we had to drive to Lynchburg which is about 1 1/2 hours away so that we could keep the streak going. It was really fun, the kids were all great. Todd and I decided at dinner that if he does not get a job we are finding a way to move back to Europe, and all in all it was a great evening.

I don't know why I look that way...oh wait I do I am at dinner with 4 kids.

The girls started taking gymnastics, they love it!

Monsters and Monster cupcakes

The birthday Party. So I lost track of how many invitations we had given out so with the prospect of having 20 10+year olds in our house because it was raining was going to be, well...fun. So I made a quick plan of feeding them lost of sugar, giving them 10 bags of jumbo marshmallows and setting them loose in the den to have a "snowball fight." By the end every pillow in our house was in use as a "Fortress" and there were marshmallows being thrown everywhere by everyone including Todd who seemed determined to get anyone who did not seem like they were interested in playing. Everyone survived they had a blast and we will be finding marshmallows until we move.

Cousin Elli and Anna came to visit! The girls, myself included, had a great time. Anna cooked for us. I tried to pretend to object but I am selfish and she's a great cook so we let her. The girls of so funny together, they played dress up, ponies, and then danced around.

We Decided to get out of town at the last minute and went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

That is actually THE grave digger, or one of them. It is from Kitty Hawk NC and when we flew by that thing on the way there I had to turn around so that we could go see it.

What we did most of our time there, you can see Todd in the background working out.

It's about a 4 hour drive from here so not too bad. I found a hotel with a pool and the kids were more than game for that. We loaded everyone into the car and headed out. Sierra had the last(we hope) of the stomach flu we had passed around so she had spent the better part of the morning throwing up. My hope was that once we hit the road she would have nothing left to throw up. This should be good material for my "Mother of the year award." Anyhow, off we went. Kids were pretty good in the car, no one threw up and we found ourselves on a tiny sliver of land known as the Outer banks.

The hotel was right on the beach and we scored a room on the ground floor next to not only the pool but also the game room so we were good to go. Everything we needed was within 20 yards of our room...obviously if you were a young couple with no kids this would be like getting the room right by the ice machine, but for us it was perfect. The weather was awful but we just made the best of it. We went to the beach, collected shells, found a crab we named "Bo." He was dead but made a great pet, in fact we gave him to a friend as a birthday gift when we got home. We went to the Wright Brothers national park where we learned a lot and the kids became Jr Rangers. The kids were supposed to tour the museums and exhibits, watch a movie, and fill out a booklet in order to earn their badge. Thinking it was a rather cursory thing in order to earn your plastic badge I basically cheated and helped Austin fill out his as it was the hardest. I guessed a lot, left stuff blank I didn't know, and generally did a rather poor job. I asked Todd to go help the kids turn them in and get their badges but when 20 minutes later he still had not returned I went looking. There they were correcting all the mistakes I had make on Austins. Apparently they take this Jr Ranger stuff seriously. The kids were sworn in and received their badges.