Lijah's 8th Birthday

On Elijah’s birthday we gave him the gifts from our family, and as always all of the brothers had a blast making little homemade gifts and drawing pictures for Lijah, and then wrapping them up themselves and giving them to him. Michael and I had spent a while removing and sewing on patches to a Cub Scout shirt that I had picked up at a garage sale last summer (I think we’ll need to use a sewing machine next time, because sewing on those patches by hand takes just about forever, but we got almost all of the patches on). Anyway, we gave him that shirt, and Kolby handed down his hat and neckerchief for the scout uniform, and Lijah made a fun neckerchief slide with Grandpa Dick when he was here, and got a fun scout t-shirt and socks from Grandpa Dick & Grandma Debbie for his birthday, so he’s all set for scouts now. Michael and I also gave him some rollerblades, which he was excited to try out. And my parents gave him a really cool lego watch with a lego building set that builds a little clock with flash cards to practice telling time. He loved that little watch, and we were so disappointed that the watch band broke in two different spots within a week or so, so we had to return it. Of course they didn’t have any more of them, but we were lucky to find a different style of lego watch at a different store to replace it, so we’re crossing our finger that this one is a little sturdier and will last for a while.

Then Lijah had a fun birthday party with his brothers and some of his friends from school and church. We had planned to have a Lego party, and I just figured that I’d pull out our little collection of Legos that the boys have started to get since we’ve been here (since their set of Legos from before the move is in storage) and the kids could play with those at the party. But we were so blessed – just a few days before the birthday party a lady at Michael’s work mentioned that she had a box of legos that her kids had grown out of and asked if our boys would like them. We were so excited for the boys when we got them, and it was a large box full to the top, so we saved them and waited until the party to show them to the boys. It was great, because we were able to do some really fun lego games at the birthday party. First we split the kids into teams and gave them each 10 minutes to see who could build the tallest tower. Then the best game came next: we set out 4 chairs, 2 each about a foot or two apart from each other, and we told the two teams they had 30 minutes to build the strongest bridge in between their two chairs. We told them that after the time ran out we would test to see which bridge was strongest by adding more and more soup cans on the bridge until it would break. The kids ended up asking if they could extend the building time out to 45 minutes (it took them a little while, and a couple broken bridges during the construction process, to get it figured out). And I was a little concerned that the bridges would break before placing more than 2 or 3 cans on them. We sure were surprised when the winning bridge held 19 soup cans before it finally gave in, and the other bridge held nearly that much too (and I love the expressions on the kids' faces in the photos while they are watching to see how strong their bridges are). Anyway, it was a rather creative game with plenty of teamwork, so it was especially fun. 

Later on, after the party, Courtland helped me sort through the entire big box of legos and get out all the people figures and put together as many little lego people as we could. There were over 80 minifigure people in the box (which is great, because the lego people have always been the favorite pieces of all of our boys). And the boys have all spent a good number of hours building with the legos since then. It sure was nice of Michael’s coworker to pass these great toys along to our boys, thanks!