Clara's 7th Birthday Party

Clara Grace wanted a Tangled theme for her birthday this year. While searching for invitations I came across a lady online that will personalize invitations and a little over 24 hours after placing the order, I had a finalized proof. I think these turned out really cute. I printed them on photo paper to give a really nice crisp finish. After handing them out we received lots of positive comments on how well they turned out. It was also nice to be able to print off as many as I needed and not worry that I would run out. Since there were two invitations per image, I was able to print off a total of four invitations per page.
Being the smart marketing lady that she is, she also replied with the final proof that she could easily provide a thank you graphic. I'm a sucker, so went for it. I'll have Clara write a personal message on the back, but I thought they were really cute.
We chose to have the party in the community room of an apartment building here on base. Clara Grace is now too old to use the room we used last year. Our community room is booked for the entire year and after we were lucky to land this one. I did some online searching for ideas and it turned out rather well I think. The table below had Tangled coloring sheets and puzzles for the kids to work on upon arriving (or throughout the party as it turned out).

Here are the party favor boxes. I opted to get a more masculine one for the boys. This is also where the gifts were placed.
The braid was inspired by this blog and the "Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn Rider" game from this blog. Charlie and Clara helped me make the braid. I used five packages of yarn. Our backs were rather sore by the time it was over. We measured it after completing the braid and discovered it was 11 feet long. This inspired me to make a game of it. After greeting the guests upon arrival I pointed them over here to guess how long Rapunzel's braid was. There were little slips of paper to make the guess on and then they put their guess in the little bowl. The winner was Haley, with an estimate of 3 feet. Clara Grace came in second with a guess of 20 feet. From there, the estimates were waaaaay off, all the way up to 100 feet.
This is the poster I made for the Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn Rider game. Clara Grace thinks I am wonderful after watching me make this. One day she will discover it only took a lot of determination to complete the thing and very little talent. I found a poster online that someone else had made, printed it off on a transparency and off to school I went to use my overhead projector. Clara Grace had never seen one in use and was quite amazed. I had to explain this was old school technology and how it works. Anyway, I spent a lot of time bent over coloring in all the black once I had it traced. I was quite pleased with how it looked and must admit that I am attached to it. I have no idea what I'll do with it, but I repeatedly had to tell one little girl that kept asking for it that I wasn't ready to let it go.
We did several other games. This is a picture of a couple of girls trying to pop a balloon by squeezing it between their backs. None of the pairs were successful so I eventually ended the competition by giving the youngest little guy a little assistant.
Here we did the pull string pinata. It was quite humorous as there were only three strings left when the candy began to fall. I had to give the pinata a few taps to get a good flow though and the candy was just raining down on their little heads as they scrambled to fill their bags.


I was really pleased with how the cake turned out. A friend of mine made it. She was worried it wasn't going to look good, but all her cakes turn out great so I had no concerns. Otherwise I was going to have to give it a try and that would have been...sad. The commissary has very limited birthday cake options.

Zach had a blast and was cute when the kids played freeze dance to the Tangled soundtrack. For the most part he just ran around and did his own thing.
The kids were so cute watching Clara Grace open gifts. I was amazed that there were no duplicates and the gifts were all really nice and thoughtful.
The time flew and the kids all seemed to have a lot of fun. Clara Grace loved it and was very pleased. She had ten friends show up plus adults. Charlie and I stayed rather busy between leading games, making sure Zach was doing ok. Charlie also had to go pick up the pizza since the scheduled delivery never happened. The result is that we didn't get a ton of pictures of the action. After the party several people stayed and helped us clean up. They had us loaded up and ready to leave in very little time.

Happy 7th Birthday Clara Grace!

Clara Grace is seven years old today. The time has really passed quickly. She is such an amazing little girl, but packed in that tiny frame is one plucky little lady. Sometimes she pushes back when I push her to conquer something, but for the most part she tackles any challenge with gusto. It will take me a couple of days to pull pictures to cover her entire life span since pictures are on so many discs, however here are a few that I think really capture the essence of the girl she has become.

To begin with, she absolutely loves nature and all animals. Here she is gently approaching a kangaroo at Safari Land. I bet Blaze wishes she approached him so calmly.

She isn't even scared of licking cake batter...she was quite old before I was willing to take the raw egg risk. No fear here!
She is an awesome big sister. When really needed, she steps forward and leads Zach.
She loved taking equestrian lessons. Even when nearly thrown, she held on tightly and kept working through the lesson. She is eager to start back with lessons once we return to the states.
She has been to so many places in her mere seven years. From Plymouth Rock, to Washington D.C. Disneyworld, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and here in Iwakuni. She is always ready to try something new.
Speaking of trying something new...nothing like trying another decades fashion trend. This was 80's day at school last year. Like, oh my gosh! Gag me with a spoon!

I love this picture of her (sorry for the underlining, no idea what I did to do this). She is such a happy kid.

Nope, crocodiles don't even scare this kid!

She'll even tackle a big pretzel at Target!

Soccer, I'm in!

Ballet recital...no stage fright for her! She just considers the world her audience now.

Happy Birthday Clara!

Thank You Aunt Korin!

Aunt Korin sent a rather large package in the mail, and with a little help Clara Grace tackled it.

She figured out it was something to do with American Girl. I wish I had video so you could hear the excitement.

Reading the Card

Now, she is thrilled to get Kit and Ruthie. She has talked about those dolls for the last two years since visiting Aunt Korin and Uncle Larry before we came to Iwakuni. Now, I have to share Zach's reaction. He loves baby dolls and is a very compassionate little guy. They say he tries to soothe upset kids at daycare. The other day we were in the toy section and there was a baby that giggled and bounced when activated. Zach thought it was crying, so sat down beside it with his arm around the baby and kept talking to her and telling me what he was doing. He tried to bring the doll home with us and kept saying, "My baby!" Finally I got him to say goodbye and we left. Well, when he saw the American Girl dolls he looked at one and announced, "MY baby!" Clara Grace was very territorial of her newest acquisitions and Zach was not happy. I went and got a baby doll from Clara Grace's room (she was not thrilled with me on this one) and gave him the doll to play with. This is a picture of him sitting with the doll. He had her beside him at lunch too and was trying to offer her juice. It is pretty cute. Oh, and check out his boots. He loves them too and insisted on wearing them today. It was a rare sunny day of late so was goofy, but I went with it. He is a funny kid...insists on getting dressed first thing in the morning including shoes.

Clara Grace's First Sleepover

Clara Grace was planning to have her first sleepover yesterday. It was a little girl that had been over before, they are in the same class and her mom is a teacher as well. We had invited her over and Clara Grace was super excited. She also had her first ballet class in two years that morning. Well, I had dropped Zach off at daycare for a couple of hours so I could do some cleaning, run a couple of errands and take CG to ballet class. When I picked up Zach at 11:30, they were taking his temperature. He had a 102 temperature. I told Clara Grace that we might have to cancel the sleepover. She handled it well, but was bummed. Her friend was flying out for the states on Wednesday. I scheduled an appointment with the doctor, and she said he had another ear infection. Anyway, the mom and I mutually agreed that sleeping over was not a good idea, so she offered to have CG spend the night with them. This was a HUGE decision for me. After talking to Charlie, we decided to give it a try. Boy was she stoked! It was really tough for me and I was eager to have her come home. The mom said CG did great, but did have trouble falling asleep. Luckily she wasn't difficult, just struggled while laying there. She said that finally when she checked on the girls at 10:30 that she was asleep. You can see how tired she is today, but she had a great time.

Meet Marty

Clara Grace has very diverse interests. She has really been wanting to get a beetle for a long time. We decided that we would reward her with one if she passed all of the timed addition and subtraction drills that were first grade goals. Although she does very well with math assignments, she wasn't really motivated with the timed drills. Once we dangled the beetle in front of her, it lit a fire and she zoomed through them. Soooo, off to the store we went to get a beetle. She wanted to name it Martha, but after googling it, I discovered that the males were the ones with the big mandibles. So, it is Marty. Meet Marty.

He is huge. I haven't measured him, but I would estimate he is at least three inches long.

Photo Update

Well, when I went to add photos, I realized just how much time has passed since the last pictures were posted. Here are a few brief pictures to span the time.

This picture was taken the day before Easter. A teacher on my grade level invited a lot of families to her house for an Easter egg hunt and visiting. She lives out in town and lives in a traditional Japanese house. Zach was drawn to the drums. See those drum sticks under the drum...yes, they had to be removed from his hands repeatedly. I seemed much more stressed about it than Gina though. I spent my time chasing Zach for the most part.
Clara Grace had a blast playing with all the kids. Here, she climbed up on this rock, which was REALLY high.
Here is a group shot of most of the kids there. Since I was chasing Zach, I got very few action shots of the actual hunt.

Here are our baskets Easter morning.

The kids ready for church.

Walking back from church. We live really close.

Clara Grace completed another year of AWANA.

Charlie took the day off to go with Clara Grace to the zoo on a field trip.

On Memorial day we went out to the beach to search for shells.

Oh, we also got a new car. Road taxes were due, and the van Charlie was driving was also going to have a JCI inspection very soon which it was going to not be cost effective to do all that since it was having some problems...so we replaced it. Luckily we got a great deal and I LOVE this vehicle. I could definitely use it in the states. Charlie is now driving the blue Pajero Mini and I have this since it is so spacious. If the door is open, Zach can climb in and get in his seat by himself. There is plenty of cargo room for groceries in the back. I'll miss it when we leave here, because I know we couldn't buy something like this for $2,000 back there.

The Zachster

Clara Grace on her way to getting very dizzy

A picture to show off the many missing teeth of Clara Grace

The force is strong with this family! I had been vacuuming and Zach grabbed the wand off the vacuum and began using it like a light sabre. Clara Grace is not to be outdone so she scampered off to her room to return with her light sabre.

This is Clara's first grade teacher, Mrs. Clark. Clara Grace loves her dearly. A couple of parents organized a little surprise going away party for her as she is leaving Iwakuni behind after 11 years here and going to teach in Germany.

What ya doin, Mama?

Zach is coming along on his speech. I think he is probably right where he needs to be with it. Now he is at the point where he uses everyone's name.

"What ya doin Mama?" (I get this a LOT. If I move, it inspires the question.)

"Where's Cwawa?"

"Mama, sit down"

"I sit down"

"I ride bike"

You get the idea. He is also using some adjectives and communicating rather well overall, but there are certainly some times I'm just clueless as to what he wants. He has definitely mastered the use of "no" and "mine". Although I have a pretty good idea of what he wants, I do have to translate for Charlie some so he might not be as clear as I think.

Clara Grace lost another tooth!

Clara Grace lost her fifth tooth on Thursday, June 2nd. She was soooo excited to lose it at school because then she gets to go to the nurse to get a cute little plastic treasure box to put it in. I find it a little humorous that I get to hear about it multiple times before I actually see Clara Grace in person to tell me.

It is interesting that my class and CG's class are on the same special rotation and we have Spanish on the same days, my class coming later in the day so those teachers let me in on any noteworthy experiences. I dropped my kids off at Spanish to discover she had lost the tooth in class, then later passed her teacher that revealed the tooth was literally laying on her lip before it came out!

That night she put the tooth in an envelope, wrote a note on it to the tooth fairy and drew a lovely depiction of the tooth fairy on it. I hear it was a close call, but the tooth fairy almost forgot but did come through with another book in the Big Apple Barn series that delighted the little lady. I have got to get some good pictures showing Miss Snaggle Tooth's smile.