Fall and Emmett's 7th Birthday

We have welcomed Fall with gorgeous weather and haven't had to turn our heat on yet (tonight might be the night).  I have just completed working an extra day each week for three weeks straight, so I'm glad to be looking forward to a little more free time.  We have continued to be busy with soccer practices and games.  One of the parks that we have soccer at has baby swings.

Ezra's team has been having fun together.  They have six players and there are 10 teams.  They play a 20 minute game after a big group warm-up and team practice.  The game is 3v3, so the kids all get a pretty good opportunity to get their feet on the ball.  This past week I was the substitute coach.  We have 2 players that are quite aggressive and one of them is a scoring machine.  We probably won the game 20-1 (we don't really keep track of the score).  This past week all but one of our players were able to get a goal, so that was fun.

Emmett's team has been playing some challenging teams and doing well.  Jim has either been referee or sideline judge for all the games and this past week he was assistant coach.  He really wasn't looking for that kind of involvement, but they have needed him and he has been kind enough to help out.  The first few weeks of the season they got an extra practice each week with a professional British player.  The picture below shows the team with him.

Elliott's birthday "theme" was beach balls since they are a favorite toy for him.  So I made this beach ball pinata and it turned out OK, but we never used it.  Jim decided to turn it into a death star pinata for Emmett's Star Wars themed birthday, so now I will have to get a picture of it.  Because Emmett's party was at a pizza place, we weren't able to do the pinata at his party, so it continues to sit, un-battered.

Emmett's 7th birthday fell on a Wednesday and I was off work that day because I switched with a co-worker.  I got up extra early to make cinnamon rolls for him.  I halved the recipe, but we still end up with 12 large rolls, and I think we are overdosed on them for a while now.  He got to open a couple gifts before school and he took doughnuts to school as his treat to share with his class.  When he got home we worked hard to finish his homework for the day so we could focus on birthday stuff in the evening.  Jim was able to come home an hour early from work.  Emmett was more than ready to open presents when he got home.

After opening gifts and skyping with grandparents we went to Red Robin for dinner.  Emmett had pizza, mandarin oranges and of course an ice cream sundae.  On Sunday we had a friend birthday party.  We went to a restaurant/pizza place that also has a huge kid play area, arcade and laser tag.  We rented the laser tag area for an hour and Emmett got to invite 6 friends in addition to himself and Ezra.  They played 3 fifteen minute games of laser tag in a large, dark room with black lights and all sorts of walls and windows to hide behind.  The vests were a little large, especially for Ezra, but they had a blast.  After wearing them out with laser tag we had pizza and cupcakes and then Emmett opened gifts.  Every single gift was a lego set!  He has already put half of them together and is working on another set as I write this.  The death star pinata is actually pictured below on the table.  

dark blue frosting...glad we weren't at home!

The laser tag crew