Birthday celebrations and new furniture

This week we celebrated two of our boys' birthdays. They turned 12 and 15. Their birthdays are withing a couple weeks of eachother, so they elected to have a combination party. For several years now, we've given our kids a set $$ amount to spend on their birthday celebration and they get to budget that and decide what they want to do. Some have chosen to have parties at home and spend lots on decorations and games, and others have chosen to have it somewhere else. Surprisingly, no one has asked to just pocket the money and nix the party.....yet. :-) The boys decided to pool their money together and have their party at the local bowling alley/laser tag place. We went on one of their discount days-Tuesday-when they have half price bowling and 2 for 1 laser tag-and held it in the afternoon (perfect for us homeschoolers!) We almost had the whole place to ourselves-it was great-and they stayed within their budget. Here are the boys opening up some of their gifts from mom and dad pre-party. A new bb gun for our 12 yo. Can you see the happiness on his face?

And my 15 yo received some camping necessities that he will need for Boy Scouts.

Along with our family (a party in itself), several friends came to the bowling alley to join in the celebration. Everyone had a great time and it was a blessing to see the older ones enjoy helping the littler ones out.

Here's Dad with our 2 yo. She had a great time bowling and jumped up and down every time she knocked down the pins!

Even little guy enjoyed just sitting back and watching all the fun. Eventually, he fell asleep.

After bowling, it was on to the cakes. The boys wanted very plain cakes (no goofy characters!), so they got what they requested. One chocolate-one strawberry. Yes, we did realize that one cake was pink . I pre-warned my 12 yo about this, but that's what he wanted. We only had one party guest say, "Why do you have a pink cake?" But when he explained it was strawberry, nothing else was said about it. In fact, everyone loved the cake and scarfed it down. Those teen boy appetites!

Here they are during the happy birthday song. It's not a party until you sing that!

We had a great time-my kids can't wait until the next birthday!

In other exciting news this week, we had a special delivery at our house (no....not the kind that involves diapers and itty bitty clothes), but some new furniture! We had been shopping for a new leather sofa set for quite a while-several months. It was time. Our old set was over 10 years old. We visited most furniture stores in the area and did not like what we saw. Most everything was not 100% top grain leather, which is what we wanted. Most looked nice, but were blended leather or bonded leather. No thanks. We wanted something to last for years to come. The few sets we saw that were high quality were so expensive-almost twice what we could pay. So the search went on. On a recommendation, we decided to look online at Sam's and Costco. They don't sell much furniture in their stores, but have a much larger selection online. We researched and found a company that sells very high quality through Costco and decided to go with them. We ordered, only going off the online picture (!) as we didn't have time to even send away for a swatch, as the set was on sale for only a few days. I prayed I would like it when it arrived-and 5 weeks later, the moving truck delivered it! And yes, I do love it! It's very nice-much nicer than any we saw-and we got a great price on it-about half of the furniture store. Here's my 2 yo napping on the sofa....

There's also a loveseat, but I didn't post a pic of that. The comfiest piece of all, I think, is the big oversize chair and ottoman (aka. dad's seat). It's heaven sitting in it and relaxing. It's great, too, because it fits 2 kids on it!

I'm very happy with our purchase and would definitely go that route again. Well, I'm off to enjoy relaxing in my new couch! Ahhhhhh.............