The Post that Almost Was.

March 2 was Texas Independence Day, a celebration of the day Texas declared its independence from Mexico, creating the Republic of Texas. I almost wrote a post telling you how we celebrated with Texas Family Night. I had it all planned in my head. I took lots of pictures. And then...well, somehow I just never got it written. But I almost did.

In the almost-post, I would have told you how we started out with chili (no pics) for dinner, because that's the state "dish" of Texas - with iced tea, of course. And we finished off with pecan pie, because pecan is the state tree of Texas. (And yes, that's a pecan pie in a box. Because, you know, I'm so Betty Crocker-y and all. You didn't think I'd actually bake a pecan pie, did you? No, I didn't think so. They really were pretty good.)

The almost-post would have said that during dinner we played a little Texas trivia, and then after dinner I gave everyone the choice of making a Texas flag or a tissue-paper bluebonnet (Texas' state flower). Everyone except me chose the flag. (But Jacob did decide to paint a bluebonnet after he finished painting his flag.) :)

Someone obviously missed out on Texas history class. Um, the star goes on the other side, Honey.

Happy (almost) Texas Day!

P.S. The spacing problem with Blogger isn't fixed. I found some online forums that indicated lots of people are having the same problem I have been. I tried dozens several of their different suggestions for working around the problem until Blogger gets it fixed, and finally, FINALLY found one that works! It's a pain, but patches the problem for now. Hoping Blogger gets it fixed fast!

No Ordinary Family Night

We were having a hard time scheduling Family Night this week. Lots going on. We planned it for Monday, but life got in the way and we didn't get started early enough. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights already had plans, so it looked like Tuesday was our only option unless we wanted to wait until next week....which will be even busier.

Tuesday, however, was the long-awaited and much-anticipated premier of the new series, No Ordinary Family. (Which, in 20-20 hindsight, turned out to be not such a wholesome, family friendly event. ahem. Live and learn.) Some in our family had been waiting weeks for this premier and couldn't bear the thought of missing it. Hmmm, what to do?

No Ordinary Family?

or Family Night?

No Ordinary Family?

Family Night?

HEY....

And so was born....No Ordinary Family Night.

No craft. No themed dinner. No decorations. No scavenger hunt (gasp!). Instead, we each took turns showing off our super powers (did you watch the show?), and challenging the others to try it. :) Then we watched the premier. Not fancy, but fun and laugh-filled. At the end of the night Jacob said, "That's it? That's all we're doing? This isn't like our other family nights."

Nope. It was definitely No Ordinary Family Night.

Daddy started off the Feats of Strength with one-armed pushups.



We all aced that one (ha), so he upped the ante with one-eyebrow pushups.



Pretty clear Mom came in last on that one.

Next it was Kloe's turn, with her death-defying hula-hoop stunt.




Apparently I can't hula-hoop either. Mom's not doing so well.

And, um, Daddy's "jump roping your own leg" feat? We're not even going there.



This was Jacob when it was his turn to challenge the family....



So we gave another turn to Daddy, who is a semi-expert juggler.


(it looks like Kloe has a ball stuck in her teeth)

And for my turn? Oh...um...well...ah...since I seem to have no recognizable talents that we've been able to identify (I can 10-key with the best of 'em, but you know, that's not cool), I chose to do the only thing I could think of that my family might not be able to copy - a flashback to my sorority girl days - saying the Greek alphabet before a lit match burned my fingers. Yep, I won that one. Since no one else in the family is allowed to play with matches, and all.



Oooooo, I'm good. :)



We topped off the evening with No Ordinary Brownies. Actually they were very ordinary. From a box. But still extraordinarily yummy. :)

Family Night - Rainbows

In light of the torrential downpours we endured enjoyed for four straight days over the 4th of July weekend, and in honor of the sun finally coming out on Monday, we had Rainbow Family Night on Tuesday night. I'm telling you, you really can make a family night theme out of anything.

I found lots of fun rainbow ideas at Kaboose Crafts and BirthdayPartyIdeas.com (I use them for a lot of family night ideas).

We started by making a slightly less-cute version of this rainbow cake, that I actually first heard about on my friend Jenni's blog. We used a regular white (oops, I think I may have used yellow, but it worked) cake mix, divided it into six equal parts, and added gel food coloring (liquid won't work) to make the colors of the rainbow.



We each layered the batter colors in our own little glass baking dish.





Umm, oops....a bit too much batter I guess. We had rainbow volcanoes.



And I forgot that the original cake was actually baked in layers, with frosting in between. Oops. It did look way prettier than ours. But look! Didn't these turn out cool? I think it was more fun to see the different patterns in each one.



While the cakes were baking, we made this rainbow ice cream by alternating layers of softened vanilla ice cream with various flavors of jell0 powder.



Kinda blurry, but it came out really pretty! And fun, but oh. so. sweet.



While the ice cream was re-freezing, we attempted to paint rainbow quesadillas with the leftover food coloring gel. It actually worked pretty well, but for some reason Kloe and Jacob wanted to paint bullseyes on theirs (???) instead of rainbows.



And this odd picture is lemonade with blue ice cubes. It turned green as the ice cubes melted. :)



After dinner we made what were supposed to be rainbow hats, but we didn't put enough streamers on them so they actually looked more like thinning clown hair.



Wanna guess how we ended the night? Go ahead, I bet you can guess! I was looking back through our old Family Night posts and had to laugh at how many times we've done scavenger hunts. I guess it's my stand-by when I can't come up with any other activities. So this time we went searching for the rainbow! We colored strips of paper to make two rainbows, then each of the kids had their own clues to find all the pieces of their rainbow.







Once they had each found all their pieces, they had to put them together in the right order, then use the numbers written on the back of the pieces to decipher the code to open the lock on....



The Pot of Gold, of course!



FUN family night....even with exploding volcano cakes, too-sweet ice cream, bullseye quesadillas, clown-hair hats, and a red, polka-dotted pot of gold! So thankful family nights don't have to be perfect!