Maddie's 9th Birthday and Art Party

It's hard to believe that Maddie is 9 years old!!

We celebrated her with an art party.

She is my spunky, colorful, talented girl.

Mads helped me make the royal icing "paint splats".

We got the aprons at the dollar store.

I was going to put each girl's initial on their apron.

Maddie suggested splatter paint.

{smart kid}

Love the way they turned out!

The morning of the party we stuffed some tissue paper confetti into clear balloons.

So cute!

All the adorable printed frames came from One Charming Party.

Art books!

{checked out from the library}

Homeschool art:)

The balloons.

Cute, right?

A quick project with some old boring mugs and a bottle of black puff paint.

I love having one little corner of party theme prettiness!

Artists at work.

Caity was so serious with her painting.

Self portraits!

Party friends:)

Pretty fruit!

Happy birthday Madsaladsa!

More rainbow fruit.

We spruced up an old pair of Capri's for the party, too!

It was such a fun day, celebrating our Maddie girl:)

Maybe Not So Cultured...Yet

This weekend we drove JD to the airport in Bellingham, WA.

{JD is Mike's buddy from Ohio.  He came to visit for three weeks.}

While we were close, we took the opportunity to stay at our favourite hotel in Vancouver.

The River Rock!

Enjoying the sunset after a swim.

{okay honestly tho, they were freezing and totally not into it, I forced this picture!}

The next morning we took to the streets of Vancouver, headed for the Art Museum.

I was so excited to see the Matisse exhibit.

My family is a bit unconventional.

Ya they don't really play by the rules.

Love visiting the "big city"!

Apparently it was a bit loud for Bria!

We say "came-bee"

This street is "cam-bee".

So right off the bat, the kids notice a gigantic copy of Blue Nude.

Ya. 

I guess I didn't really think this one through.

Pretty much they were traumatized by their first sight at the museum.

Then there were the three C's.

{Caleb-Caity-Cambria}

"Quiet", "calm" and "don't touch" are not words in their vocabularies.

And we were at the art museum.

Mike spent most of the visit out front with the small fries.

But I loved the exhibit.

I was an art history minor in College and I still really enjoy it.

I can't quite put together a fancy enough sentence to express my thoughts here.

Simply?

I miss being able to look at, ponder, study and appreciate art.

I guess I thought taking the kids to see some of my favourite artist's work would inspire all of us.

The big girls did stand and ponder this one for a while.

Mikayla really liked this one.

Right about here is when a guy in a suit jacket with an earpiece came up and told me to stop taking pictures.

Awesome.

It wasn't the loud 3 year old or the boy-who-has-to-touch-everything that got us busted at the museum.

It was miss art history minor herself.

Culture fail.

For the most part anyways.

I felt a glimmer of interest from a few of the girls and I am hopeful that we still have a future in art appreciation:)