So after taking yesterday entirely “off” to celebrate Ashar’s 12th birthday with her, as well as celebrating Mom’s birthday today, I think I’ve mostly slipped out of my funk from Friday, and I’m pretty excited about the week ahead.

Ashar’s birthday celebration involved me making and decorating a cookie cake (adapted from this Pinterest recipe) and taking a few of her friends out for a hibachi dinner.

Regarding the cake, mad props to Mom, who figured out how to “create” an extra H from the pack of sugar letters we bought, when we found ourselves to be short one. (Ashar promptly informed me, “You know, Mom, like when you do 01134 upside-down on the calculator.” I consider myself told.)

Despite our shortness of Hs, we had some extras of other letters. Like this B. Which Ashar enjoyed.

And, finally, no birthday is complete without your friends eating out of your hand, right?

Moving on from all that sugar, now here’s a look at some of the things we might do this week… of course subject to change completely!

– Ashar loves codes, and we found this spring code sheet that she wants to do tomorrow. (It’s super-simple, but she’ll still get a kick out of it.)

– Tomorrow, Ashar wants to play in the driveway a game she made up called “ball hockey,” which seems to be a type of obstacle course you need to maneuver a ball or beanbag through. As we possess zero hockey sticks, this should be interesting.

– Ashar has also been begging to make something out of a Styrofoam ball from the craft store. (Funny part: She doesn’t care what. She just wants one of the balls.) So I said I’d see if I could find something we could make. Here’s the inside of the earth.

– We have all the stuff to put out this “nesting materials box” for the birds… except for the suet feeder, as both of ours currently hold suet. So, we’ll pick one up, and make a project out of getting it all put together!

– I’d love to plant this Easter garden.

– If we get a ton of time, we picked up some more soapmaking supplies – CHEAP! – at our local Rescue Mission economy store. So it’d be cool to make some more soap.

– Would love to take a family day trip of some sort this week, or at worst, schedule one for next. We might do something as simple as one of our local factory tours, or maybe head to a park outside our normal visiting area. Who knows?

– I found a bunch of LEGO activities that Ashar said she’d like to do. Probably we wouldn’t be quite as organized as the wonderful people who created them, but still, lots of neat stuff. This is the original set of LEGO “curriculum” for a week; this is what another family did using that as a starting point; and then I found even more great LEGO ideas on Pinterest. I know, you’re shocked.

 If you’re not already, you should clearly be following me on Pinterest to see all the stuff I want to get into. It’s a problem. 🙂