Friday Favorites: The Week We Celebrated Alec's Birthday

We had a good week; despite some very cold temperatures and a small snow storm.

We woke to clear skies and a completely thawed lake on Friday!  It's pretty rare to look out and not see ice in January.

We did a bit of school work and made up the frosting for Alec's cupcakes.  We were all ready for his friends by the time his "party" started and then we spent the next 6 or 7 hours visiting with friends.  The boys had just as much fun with their friends as I did with all my mom friends.

Even though he hesitated to call his party a birthday party everyone still brought him presents.  He got lots and lots of new cookbooks!

We spent the night putting together Alec's new rolling kitchen cabinet.  He wanted a special place to store all his baking supplies and believe me he has nearly enough to fill this thing already.

Saturday morning Alec wanted to make waffles so I quickly ran to the store and picked up a few ingredients.

We then spent a quiet day at home preparing for a party with his grandparents.  We got a fire going in the fireplace, cooked up a turkey dinner (with rice instead of mashed potatoes-- at Alec's request) and enjoyed a quiet night with our family.

We woke to a snow covered lake on Sunday.  Luckily we didn't get more than a couple of inches.  After spending a bit of the morning on snow clean up we decided to head out for a fun family outing.  We saw Jumanji: The Next Level (which we all thought was ever better than the first one!) and went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory using a bunch of our Christmas gift cards.

We did our schoolwork on Monday and then Ian and I went to run a bunch of errands; picking out flooring possibilities at Lowe's, picking up Valentine treats for an exchange I'm doing, etc.

Tuesday we had a short day of school and Alec and I headed out to his karate class.  We spent part of our afternoon on Universal Studios' website checking out all that had changed from our last visit.

Alec had some placement testing to do at the school he's looking at attending next year and we had to be there at 8 in the morning on Wednesday.  He was pretty nervous and we have absolutely no idea how he did on the actual test but based on some of the questions he came across on the math portion I'm thinking he did really well.  We're both just so glad to have it behind us.  I did give him the day off from math, reading, and language arts since the test was heavily focused on those subjects and just asked him to work on Duolingo while the other boys and I tackled their schoolwork.  He went out for a Birthday lunch/ dinner with my mother in law after we spent our afternoon watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  My younger two have informed me we have to watch all the movies again before our trip to Universal.

Ian had a dentist appointment on Thursday and while I had planned to do a full day of school with the boys we just could not sit in the house while our temps finally warmed up (granted it was only 40 out but since it was 4 on Wednesday this was a huge improvement!).  We donned some winter gear and headed out for a nice long hour hike in the snow after lunch and set a few subjects aside for another day instead.  I am so glad we did too as it was wonderful to get outside and soak in that fresh air and sunshine!