Saying Goodbye to Summer

I have took a loooong hiatus from blogging, but the spring baseball season kept us on our toes! The Summer blur started out by taxing my two kiddos to a few VBS's (always loads of fun), and a ton of time spent at the baseball field, 1 of my favorite places to be! Adler's team-the Cincinnati Reds (American Girl Doll Kit's favorite team) had a pretty good little season, we seen a lot of improvement and they finished strong :) Below is a picture of Adler and her "Coach" (her Daddy) with the girliest trophy we could order; there were only 2 other girls on the team, so the trophies belonging to them were a little different from the boys- Try out trophydepot.com they ship so fast (you can usually get Free Ground Shipping for orders over $99), and ordering/personalization is so quick and easy! Plus, look how cute they turned out!

Of course, with any of my kids' end-of-season ball cook-outs, there's the cookies:)

This 2-tier platter is 1 of my favorite finds from TJ MAXX Homegoods! I love it!!!!

 

Brant's team, the Mini Mayhem (named after their older travel ball team predecessors) went undefeated for the entire season, coming in 1st in the league in their age division and took the entire gold bracket tournament as well with a perfect record.

You can barely see Brant peeking out of the "mayhem" but he's looking back at us and the memories and excitement of this day will last a lifetime! I'm so glad 1 of our baseball mom's snapped this picture!

And again, I was back in the kitchen shortly after rolling out some more baseball-themed cookies! I've become a lot more "efficient" at getting these done, since I've got 2 playing spring/fall ball.



Shortly after ball season was our family vacation to the beach, where Brant requested we host his birthday party. He really enjoyed last year's birthday party at the beach and it truly makes things a lot easier on me, so I was happy to oblige. Check out Brant's surf birthday party from last year here http://catchmyparty.com/parties/brants-6th-surf-sand-and-sun-birthday-party



In keeping with this year's "beachy" birthday theme, Brant chose a shark theme. And, since we were traveling, I kept the party details as simple as possible. Here's a few pictures:

 

Party printables always make things more clean and simple and of course help to "define" the theme I bought the entire shark printables file from Paper & Cake Printable Partyware

http://www.paperandcake.com/?s=shark&post_type=wpsc-product

 



See the entire party here! This was a lot of fun and so easy! http://catchmyparty.com/parties/brants-7th-birthday-party-swimming-with-the-sharks
 

And, of course, while I was at the beach, I had to get in some "summer reading" ;)

Another summer birthday, my niece Payton turned 7 and I got to make Hello Kitty cookies for her party too!



 All in all, it was a whirlwind of summer days spent grilling out, swimming, going to the ball field or park, the library, and a few trips to the drive-in movies thrown in for good measure! We're buckled down for a fun school year!