No sheep were harmed in the making of this birthday party.

For Amelia's birthday we had a sheep party. 20 kids 4 and younger and their moms in the neighborhood park turned into a great party for Amelia. We are certainly blessed to be part of a community with so many young children that have become my girl's best friends. The kids made sheep out of hand prints and played "Stick the wool on the sheep." Thank you friends for blessing Amelia with lots of fun toys and clothes, and especially for coming to the party!

For the cake, I chose to make sheep cake pops. I got the idea from the Bakerella blog while researching sheep cakes. I chose one of the most difficult types of cake pops to start with, and these sheep definitely had a learning curve. The concept is fairly simple but me being without any kind of culinary education except knowing how to read blogs on the internet, it turned out to be quite an ordeal. But the end product was much enjoyed by the party guests and mighty tasty! The directions are on this Bakerella entry. I had to freeze the pops to make it easier to dip, I think I may have used too much frosting or something.

For the coating I used white non-pareil sprinkles, a candy blackberry for the face, cut up licorice for the legs and little licorice for the ears. For the noses I used Easter egg sprinkles. I almost wanted to use sheep meat instead of crumbled cake, but that would have been a little violent, let alone more expensive. Ironic too. Some of the sheep looked a little, um...slow because of their misshapen bodies or weird-facing legs. My rationale for this is that sheep aren't the smartest of animals so it's okay if they don't look perfect. As Pastor Mark Driscoll has said, "The smartest sheep is still just a sheep."

Preschool Crafts

This quarter I have been working Wednesday nights at church in the preschool class. Parents are in classes or Redemption Groups so the kids are in "Kids Kore." It's one of the highlights of my week. It is very tiring at the end of a long day, but I love seeing the kids learn about Jesus and love Him more. I also love Wednesday nights because Caley is in the preschool class, and it's fun to see her playing with other kids in that setting. 

We are doing the Big Book curriculum, which is basically a Bible story a week told through a big storybook. Then we play some games to help the kids learn the story and do a craft. I've been planning and preparing the crafts this quarter, which is really fun for me. There has been the occasional week I can't think of a craft or run out of time to prepare, but the good thing about preschoolers is that they're easily amused. In a pinch, shaving cream, playdough, or just coloring is a good activity. They especially like playing group games like "Lost Little Sheep" which the class assistant Janessa does with them, or just running around pretending to be a dinosaur. It gets really loud in class sometimes. But that's bound to happen with 15 kids in a room at 830 at night.

Here are the crafts we've done. Most of these crafts I got from the internet and tweaked a bit.

Story of Abraham and Sarah
Noah and the Ark
Joshua and the Wall of Jericho- baked dough bricks (salt, flour, water) with playdough as the mortar
On left- Daniel in the lion's den; On right- Moses in the bulrushes (egg carton cup for basket, piece of felt, tiny baby inside)

Jonah and the big fish

Can you tell I like using paper plates? They're not just for eating! 

It's an EVE party!

For Caley's birthday, she said she wanted an EVE party. (EVE is from the movie WALL-E.) And that's what she got! It's been like an EVE factory at our house for the last few weeks. For her party she invited three girlfriends over for dinner, cake and watching WALL-E! Then they had a sleepover! It's been really fun planning and preparing for this party.

The invitation

The practice cake...looks okay, tasted sickenly sweet.

The Rice Krispie treat cake we had at playgroup.

The biggest project by far was the EVE doll pillows. I got the idea from this website and adapted it based on the materials I could find. I'm not a seamstress by any means, so this was fairly challenging for me, especially since I hadn't used my sewing machine for over 2 years. Actually there are a lot of mistakes and if I were to make many more hopefully each one would look better than the last. But it's for kids, so who cares. For the body I used T-shirts. For the patches I used felt because it doesn't fray, and for her plant symbol I used iron-on patches for pants cut into the correct shapes.

The girls also made EVE puppets. I originally was going to have them stuff the dolls, but that'd be too much work sewing them back up on party night. They seemed to enjoy the puppets!

And finally, the last EVE cake!

They didn't sleep as much as I'd hoped, but it was still a really fun party!

"Thank you friends for coming to my party!" -Caley