Nathan had a birthday!

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Nathan had a birthday!

Nathan waited all year for this day (or so it seemed)! He was so looking forward to taking treats to school and then a scout activity (his first one as a Webelos) after school. The day dawned and he was sick! So he had to stay home. :(

But as you should already know, we are used to such birthday illnesses and made some adaptations. We postponed going out to dinner, but we carried on with presents and cake! (We are quite stalwart, I know.)

Here is the newly turned ten-year-old, surrounded by eager siblings. What was Nathan going to get?!?

Among his presents were his scout book and Webelos colors. He also got a real CTR ring (meaning it won't turn his finger green and cost a few pennies) and socks. I spared you the pictures of that!

Chad and I were excited to give him this present. It's a series of pieces that snap together to form electrical circuits and includes things like magnets, motors, light bulbs, etc. It's call Snaptricity. Learn more about it here.

But even that gift was upstaged by the pocket knife/key chain that Daniel passed on to him. Boys!

Don't forget the cake! I wanted to make a cake that would be something interesting to Nathan. I decided to make him a Hexbug cake, but was dismayed to not find any examples on the internet. What? I can't have that original of an idea. My first thought was to cut out the hexes and tracks from the cake but decided that would be too difficult and resorted to "drawing" everything on. The actual Hexbugs still vexed me and I took another easy road...I used real ones!

It's not to scale, but it still tasted good.

Nathan blew out the candles and served up the cake.

The girls liked it. (Sarah is always climbing on the table...it drives me nuts!)

The boys liked it, too. I did learn an interesting lesson about serving sizes. This was just one cake mix, baked in a 1/2 sheet pan. We got skinny, but wide pieces of cake and tricked ourselves into eating only half the cake. In past experiences, we have polished of the entire thing! It's a small stroke of genius...that I'll probably not do again just for the sake of eating less.

After cake, the kids "helped" Nathan assemble some circuits. The kit comes with a booklet that gives a diagram and instructions and explains what is happening. The kids were really just intrigued by the fan that they could make fly straight up into the air. Boys!