Swimming Party at the YMCA and Sewing Dog Toys

It is hard to believe but our granddaughter Allegra is now SEVEN!  Where has the time gone? In our pile of seven grandchildren, she is second in the pecking order, with Jameson being the oldest at the age of 8.  

Our son Dan's wife, Heather, helps out at the East Side YMCA in Green Bay. She arranged for Allegra to have her birthday party at the Y... with swimming for all of her cousins, friends and family.  Then later to have birthday treats in a meeting room. 

~What a Great Place for a Birthday Party!~ 

After all of the little ones got into swimsuits,

they hopped on into the pool to splash and shriek and scream.... 

(Birthday gal is in the orange goggles in the middle of the pic) 

All of her little cousins were in attendance.... 

Almost an emergency oops when Jameson realized he forgot to pack his swimsuit!!!!  But Grandpa to the rescue was able to scrounge up an extra suit from the lost and found, (it had been washed and dried before going into the box, and will be washed and dried again before it is returned to the box) .  Thank you Grandpa for making this little boy smile. 

Jameson and Chelsea

Clayton and Mason

 Little Whitney at one year old with her parents,

giving them a good splashing in the face! 

Grandpa did his duty with the youngest grandchild, Claire, 

so her Mommy and Daddy could swim with the older siblings.

After all the wet kiddos were dragged from the fun water playground, it was time to get them all in clothes, and back to the meeting room for a birthday party.  Presents were opened and Happy Birthday was sung over ice cream treats for all of the kids (with so many allergies, no birthday cake was requested by some of the other moms) 

~~~~~~~~~

Afterwards, we took two soggy giggly girls back to our house!  They were so excited to have a GrandGirlsSleepover at our house.  We made up a list of things we wanted to get done together. One of the most creative activities was to make some Christmas doggie toys on Grandma's sewing machine.  

My Janome sewing machine has a slider button that lets you control the speed of the machine.  So no matter how far down you push the foot control, it will go very slowly. No needles through fingers for these young seamstresses.   They learned about putting fabric right sides together, sewing the seams, turned it right side out, and adding a foam disk. Then they learned about topstitching around the edges to close the opening. 

Such concentration!!! They made doggie toys for all of the family's dogs for Christmas.  They have both helped me in the past to sew seams on quilts, but this is the first time that each one did a complete project by themselves (with a bit of help from Grandma)

SSSSHHHHHHHH   

no telling all the doggies what their Christmas present is

(the dogs can't read my blog)

The girls helped with other projects around the house...

like setting up my Christmas Village inside of the china hutch. 

Saw this on Pinterest as an idea to put it in the hutch

instead of taking up a lot of room across the top of the buffet or mantle.

I painted each and every piece of this set, and have put it up over the years, but never with the grandkids' help.  This year was kinda special to have such good helpers to assemble and arrange it all.  

A long long time ago, my friend Connie gave me four more houses to paint. I never got around to doing them.  The girls were SO excited about the Christmas Village that I let them each paint two of these houses on their own.  I added their names and the year on the bottoms. They are going to take them home to start their OWN Christmas Village and share the extra house with their younger siblings.  How thoughtful!

All of the grandkids love to help with the cooking---  so we put on a big old pot of beef vegetable soup. They helped chop up all the veggies (with blunt knives) and dumped them into the soup pot.  Adding spices and at the end the big bowtie noodles were the chef duties of the day.  Yummmmm

Everything was going along good...... 

Until......

We had a pretty rough night... the flu bug hit us!  It was a long long night on the bathroom floor with puking and shakey jittery bodies and weakness and stomach pains.  First Chelsea, then me, and later on little Allegra when we got her delivered back home. Only Steve was spared the flu bug as it raged through the rest of us. I was supposed to appear to do some fundraising and sock cranking at a Wisconsin Sheltie Rescue event... but opted to crawl into bed and felt like I was going to die.

It is now Wednesday and I am finally starting to feel back to normal.  Ugh.