Watermelon Party

Feel like a refreshing, bright and simple party theme?
Why not try a watermelon party?
We just had my parents come and visit us from Australia and while they were here we celebrated my dad's 60th birthday with this cheerful theme.

Happy Birthday Gramps!

The Amazing Race

Once a month the families that work at ZOE get together for some "family" time.  
Named 'Ohana' (which means family) we each take it in turns to organize the morning's activities.
It can consist of anything that (a) involves everyone and (b) helps us to spend valuable time getting to know each other and strengthening our bond as a community of people who all live and work alongside one another in a foreign country away from our original 'homes'.
Well, this month it was our turn to organize the event, so what better way to avoid being outside in the pollution, keep the little ones amused and involve a range of age groups from 1 to 50+ than... an Amazing Race.
I chose a local shopping centre/ mall for the event and spent a couple of hours a few days before scouting it out and writing up the clues.
The rest was fun, making the clue box and all the clues in preparation for the big race!
Well I have some photos of the preparation but not from the actual day, sorry.  Part of me wanted to take my camera and part of me wanted to spend time just being in and enjoying the moment.


When out of balance, my life starts to feel like a potential-blog-post waiting to happen... so I try hard to keep some parts totally photograph-free, with just the sweet memories to dwell on in my mind (sometimes these are better than the photos anyway LOL).

And by the way, it turned out great and was a lot of fun!

Fish Party

You may or may not know this about me but I was a huge fan of the 'picnik' photo editing site.  
I say "was" because the last few times I have tried to use it, I haven't even got past uploading a photo let alone editing it and so the closure of the site in April might as well be now for all I am concerned grrrr and grrrr.  I'm still trying to find ANYTHING that compares!  Suggestions welcome!!


Anyhoo onto a more positive note.
My husband's birthday was this week.  He wanted a fighter fish!  
Since my son's fish died after it jumped out of the tank one night, we've all been talking about a replacement pet, but it was all a bit painful since our three turtles died in the same week too.  


And so, the kids and I finally went out and bought not one, but two fighter fish and we all feel excited and happy about having some pets in the house once again.


What better way to celebrate his birthday than to tie the "fish" theme together with this fishy-dinner set up?
It all came together in about two hours and was super easy to do.
The kids even made up their own party games, which were creative and impressive.  


Check out my collage- I tried a new collage making site called Photovisi:

What do you think? Leave a comment!

Finger Puppets

I've just added a few more finger puppets to our collection.

A giraffe for my daughter who LOVES giraffes.

And a dinosaur set for my two boys who are into all things "dino" at the moment.

These were so easy to make and have already been lots of fun.

Teepee!

Yesterday's project when the kids came home from school: contruct a teepee!

This was so much fun.  I bought 4 extendable shower curtain rods and 2 bright shower curtains from my local Homepro store and simply tied it altogether using some thin rope/twine.

This, of course, sparked some new imaginary games and a new play space.

It was so easy to put up that it can easily be pulled down and set up over and over again!