Tucker turns two!

Happy Birthday Tucker!

We love you so much Tucker. You are so funny and cute and sweet and special!!



Your favorite thing in the world is your brother and and he loves you more than anything! You love all vehicles, especially trains but you also love to draw and color and play art. You are a dancing machine and a climber - happiest outside playing. You absolutely love, love, love puppies and have named your first fish Nemo. You have so many words in your vocabulary and learn new ones every day...and we have found that you are definitely happy about being able to verbally communicate - even if it takes us a few tries to figure out your new words.

We feel so lucky to have you in our life - you are a constant joy, my sweet baby- I mean big boy!

Owen's 4th Birthday Party

Owen has been asking for a birthday party at his house with a Spiderman theme for months. We settled on a Super Hero party so we could incorporate Spiderman and also have capes! Thanks to a few blogs I found - we were able to come up with a fun game plan - we added to it to make it our own and ended up with a Super Hero Boot Camp celebration.

All of the kids, especially Owen, really enjoyed the party (and so did we!!). Check it out!

Super Hero (Qualification) Challenges

The kids demonstrated that they were

“faster than the speed of light”

more powerful than a locomotive

able to leap a building in a single bound

and fly like superman

Super Hero Obstacle Course Training

Practice time... the kids took turns going through an obstacle course:

jumping over a raging river

crawling like Spiderman under balloons

balancing on a bridge over a river of lava

making it through the Bat cave

jumping through a ring of fire

Cape Ceremony

They earned their capes and promised to always protect protect the innocent and fight the bad guys

Hunting the bad guys

Once it was official, the Super Heros had work to do....

Each kid had to hunt down 3 Ninjas to save the town

And then we received a report from headquarters... the leaders of the Ninjas were in the backyard hiding. Time to hunt down and capture the Villains!

Super Hero Orders? Capture and bring the bad guys to jail

Lock them up with toilet paper

And punish the villains with Silly String!

Play time and food/cake

After the activties were over- the super heros enjoyed play time, pizza, cake, and more time on the zip-line!

Happy Birthday Owen!

Tucker's 1st Birthday Party

To celebrate Tucker's 1st year milestone, we had a sledding birthday party!

We went to a great sledding park in Tahoe and set up base camp at the bottom of the beginner sledding slopes. We had a small table for snacks, a couple of blankets, about five or six chairs, and lots of sleds! It was pretty much perfect. The weather cooperated and the crowds stayed away until mid-afternoon, at which point the kids were content to climb up and down on a big snow mound and play king of the hill in an open snow field situated right behind our chairs. It was low-maintenance, but very fun, and somehow even the muffin and juice celebration worked out smoothly and maybe more importantly, mess-free!

Tucker absolutely LOVED sledding and all the kids were in heaven playing in the snow together. We had a blast and I'm pretty sure we'll have the same party for the next few years!

A few of the many pictures and one video!

Kris, Tucker, & the Galvins chilling @ base camp - situated next to a small card table, behind 2 blankets, just across a walking path at the bottom of the sledding slopes and a big snow mountain, and in front of a big snow field

sleeping baby Evin

More muffins please!

Rockets

This past weekend, we threw Owen a birthday party with some of his good pals. Before I get into the details of the party, I have to share a background story about rockets!

On Thursday evening, my Dad and Gianni arrived for a weekend visit. As I explained in a previous post, we celebrated Gianni's 13th birthday and Owen's 3rd birthday in OC a few weeks back. But like everything else I did this summer, I planned that party at the last minute and didn't give my Aunt Donna any time to shop for presents (of course I tried to say that gifts weren't unnecessary, but she wasn't having any of that!). So, soon after they arrived on Thursday night,the gifts were open. 3 year olds only have so much patience when presents are involved. My aunt gave Owen a couple of great toys (thank you!) and gave Gianni a model rocket kit!

We needed a few more supplies in order to build and launch the rockets, so Kris made a list and we purchased the goods on Friday afternoon. Friday night Kris and Gianni built a big rocket and on Saturday we had a test launch.

We had light winds on Saturday which made for an extra exciting test case because they had to "study" wind patterns and try to pick a strategic launch pad location (on the nearby elementary school field) with the hopes that the rocket would float back down on the field. They picked pretty well. We did two launches and both were successful. The rocket easily went 300-400 feet in the air and the wind carried it away from us by at least 300-400 yards. In fact, it landed outside the school grounds, at the park next door. The fun continued as Kris plotted out the best way to jump the fence to get the rocket back. The boys were luckier the second time as the rocket landed inside the park (barely!).

Because the launch was so successful, we thought we'd do a demonstration at Owen's birthday party. Our birthday party plan was pretty simple and basic. A couple of hours at the park with a picnic lunch, playground time, and cake. We figured we'd try the rocket launch and found cute and fairly safe foam rocket party favors to add to the theme. We weren't really sure how it would go, but we were pleasantly surprised. I'll save those details for the next post, and end this post with this final thought -thank you Aunt Donna for Gianni's great gift, thank you Gianni for sharing your rocket!

Summer Birthday Celebration

We were in Orange County this past weekend to celebrate birthdays. In addition to my Grandma's birthday, we had a slew of special birthdays. Many of us adults have summer and early fall birthdays and many of the kids were also born in the same months. My nephew Dylan turns 1 in a couple weeks, Owen and his cousin Aiden are turning 3 in September, my step-brother Gianni is turning 13 next week, my cousin Alysha just turned 18 and baby Ethan was born 1 month ago. We enjoyed a beautiful afternoon with pool time, a pot luck bbq, decadent desserts, and a fun family photo shoot.

Kristin and I found these great polos for the kids and decided we'd get a shirt for each of the boys so we could take a photo of all of them together. We differentiated families by color just to be extra cute. We had a vision of a perfect photo with all the boys and a few other group shots. Boy, did I have high hopes. I'm sure my camera alone has over 500 shots and I only have one with all of the boys in it! Owen cried through most it because he wanted to keep playing and Dylan was much to busy exploring the grass. We had no chance at pulling off other group photos of the boys, but still, we had a lot of fun and captured a great moment in time.

Here are a few from the night

Baby Ethan, 1 month old with Daddy Gino & Mommy Kelly

Aiden (almost 3) charming us all to pieces

Tucker enjoying life

Aiden doing his best to keep Dylan in the photo

the only shot where I have all 7 of the boys!

cousins!

Dylan - 1st birthday party (a couple week's early)

the gang