The theme for the Blue & Gold banquet this year was Chinese New Year. Everyone did a fabulous job decorating and bringing Chinese food…yum. One of the highlights was a friend who came and taught all the cubs some Karate moves. Rob volunteered to be the “bully who gets beat up by the guy who knows karate”…hehehe.

Here are the boys meditating…wish they would do that more often.

Ben’s last day as a cub scout was the Blue & Gold Banquet. He received his Webelos patch & pin and was recognized with a ceremonial painting of the face & hanging upside-down. I got to paint his face, and Rob got to hang him. Ben made the most hilarious faces, I just had to show them. Isn’t it great when you get to torture your kids:)

The title is in reference to Tattoo (De Plane, De Plane) on Fantasy Island. Ethan’s expression looks just like that, and if you don’t know what that is, you are just too young. I’m a child of the 70’s-80’s and think all those who weren’t really missed out on some great pop culture. Anyway…There was a total lunar eclipse on February 20th. We walked over to the Houses’ house (yes, their name is House) in our pj’s, took some popcorn, and mooched off their telescope. About 10pm the moon was completely covered in shadow. The kids thought hanging out that late on a school night with the neighbors was cool.

Ben turned 11 years old in February and we had a 5 hour birthday party with a bunch of his friends. We started out with a massive Nerf gun fight in the house that lasted 1 1/2 hours with blaring music and plenty of Gatoraid. Then we had dinner–pizza, watermelon, blueberries, & carrot sticks, a Dungeon & Dragon’s game for an hour or so, trampoline time, then a pinata, cake & ice cream , and presents. Afterward, we topped it off with a rubber band war. I guess the theme was “Everything Boys Like….Except video games.”

Everything we gave him for his birthday had to do dragons, so I made this funny looking castle cake and stuck dragons all over it.