Monday, May 6, 2013

The Merry Month of May

 

It's birthday week around here... Jordan turns 13 on Thursday, and Rylan turns 7 on Sunday (what a neat Mother's Day! :). We have some very nice, laid back plans, so I am actually looking forward to it. Jordan wants to go to the Hibachi (a Japanese steakhouse) for his birthday dinner, and then he will play laser tag with his good friend Abbi this weekend, hopefully. Rylan has a small(ish) party planned later this week, painting pottery with her fellow Daisy scouts friends. We will have a family dinner out on Sunday at a Mexican food restaurant that Rylan requested.

Jordan wants his usual request for birthday cake: chocolate blackout cake. I will be making allergy-friendly dairy/gluten/artificial 'anything' free chocolate frosted cupcakes for Rylan's party, and then I get the joy of puzzling out how to make a 'pond' of blue cupcakes as a base for Silvermist (the Pixie Hollow water fairy) to sit on - on a lily pad, of course, for Rylan's official birthday cake with the family on Sunday. Way easier than a doll cake, (last year's effort). Not sure if my teenage son and nephews will be thrilled to eat pretty blue cupcakes off of Tinkerbell plates - and at a public restaurant no less - but there you go. That is the wish of a certain soon-to-be seven year-old girl, and since she is the only girl in both our families, she is given a lot of latitude. :)

Jordan is getting close to reaching his savings goal for an iPad. He was initially shooting for a laptop, but I think we have finally convinced him otherwise. His birthday money just may get him there this week. I just love super-easy birthday presents.

Rylan is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her Barbie Dreamhouse that is on its way from Amazon. I am so proud of this girl. She has been saving for months, and fully funded the purchase herself. A combination of Christmas money, allowance, chore money and tooth fairy money got her there. In fact, the final push was the surprise removal of two bottom teeth at the dentist this past Friday. She earned a whopping $10 dollars (such a generous Tooth Fairy!) for that. Get this - on Friday evening, Rylan speculated how much the Tooth Fairy was going to leave her. She laid the two teeth out on the counter to compare them. One tooth was tiny - practically one sneeze away from falling out on its own (in fact, the dentist did that one for 'free'...) and the other had a very, very long root. So Rylan figured that since the long tooth was the same length as 'four' of the little tooth, then it should be worth 4x the going rate for a tooth ($4 a tooth, in our house). So she did the math and figured that the Tooth Fairy would be leaving her $20. Ahem. I informed her that I wasn't positive, but I was pretty sure that the Tooth Fairy didn't base her payment structure quite like that... I did think, however, that the Tooth Fairy did take into consideration if you went through a painful tooth extraction when you lost your tooth. So, in the end, the Tooth Fairy must have calculated a 50% increase in payment for the extracted tooth, which I think is pretty fair.

So, here's to a busy, but fun week ahead. Hope you have a good one too!

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