When we were going to Marvel Universe Live I thought we were going to a nursery in L.A. because my mommy said that we might go to a nursery in L.A. But we did not! I was so surprised! They were tricking us that it was a tree festival. It did not look like it. It looked like a movie theater. It was pretty crowded. Someone was dressed like Darth Vader and some people were wearing Spider-Man clothes like my sisters and I!

During the show, it was funny when Captain America was helping an old woman walk across the street! The show was pretty cool. No, it was cool and awesome!! One of my favorite parts was when Spider-Man swung over us and my mommy was asking me who some of the characters were.

I knew who some of the characters were, but not all of them. I like shows so when I saw the stage it kind of got me excited! The guy who was being Spider-Man in the show sounded like Spider-Man in the Ultimate Spider-Man on Netflix! They came up with a pretty good plan! Loki is a bad and sneaky little brother!

And in the night when all the people at the Marvel Universe place were leaving I think people were honking their cars with their keys so they could find their car easier in the night. It was kind of dark so we could not really see which was our car! It was so fun and we had a good time.

(P.S. Their acting and costumes were good! As my sister True and my Papi said, the Green Goblin looked like he was wearing pajamas!)

***The portion above was completely written by Brave. We had to correct some spelling errors, but the content is all her! I thought it would be fun if she wrote her perspective on the whole show!***

Marvel Universe Live at The Forum runs until Sunday, May 3. To check if they’re coming to a city near you, check out Marvel Universe Live for more info, or here on Ticketmaster.

This post is in partnership with Feld Entertainment as a Feld Family Ambassador; complimentary tickets for the show were provided. I’m always so thankful opportunities such as this (my girls are especially thankful), and also for the time you take to support me and this space.

This week’s learned, links, and thankfulness…

I guess I have been feeling off this week, or so Ben tells me. I apparently have been crankier towards him than normal. I think I’m feeling kind on anxious for True and the standardized testing she has to do next week. I’m not a fan because I don’t feel they really measure what kids know and don’t like the pressure to teach to the test. Thankfully, we don’t have to do that, but I would still like to make sure she is equipped to go through it.

I love this black straw hat and admiring these shoes.

I told Ben this would be a cool garden cage to make.

This looks like a fun project to do with the girls!

Our contractor finished our bathrooms, but now the fun really starts with decorating. I do still have to figure out the light fixture for one still, but all the hard stuff is done. Whew!

It’s May and that means my baby sister comes home in 23 days!!! I’m so excited!!! I miss her so much!!! Thankfully, she’s had access to wi-fi the last few months, so we’ve been texting all the time, but it’s still not the same. I can’t wait to plan sister hang outs again! My sister did text me about some news of another squad that’s on the world race that has had to go through some difficult circumstances. During their fifth month, and in India, a group of them were in a car with some locals that flipped. They were all injured, but one girl ended up severing her spine and was told she would no longer be able to walk. I read this post that one of the squad leaders wrote and I just weeped. I weeped for the pain they are experiencing, the joy God is giving them, and how it rebuked my self-centered and doubting heart. Dusty wrote this, “He knew what He was doing when he assembled and called us together though. God never says, “Oops.” His plans are perfect, and His ways are so much higher than any of our ways. I don’t understand it, and probably never will till I see Heaven one day, but that’s ok. That’s why we follow Jesus and have hope in a better tomorrow. This faith wasn’t built on the seen and tangible, but rather on the unseen and hoped for.”

I also read this post, “God is Greater Than Google,” and what another rebuke to my heart! I need to be slower to my phone and quicker to my knees!

I’m so thankful for friends. We all need people in our lives! I’m thankful for old friends and for new ones. I’m so glad I don’t have to navigate this tragic and beautiful world alone.

Happy weekend friends! Thank you for the time you check in here!

Paper Plate Cake Stands

Supplies:
Paper plates
Cups (be sure it’s proportionate to the plate and not too small)
Glue gun/glue stick

Directions:
Add some glue to the bottom rim of the cup, center it on the bottom of the paper plate, and attach to set in place.

I needed 9 cake stands for True’s mini hotel party, and I thought about lugging 9 small cake stands with me, but decided against it once I saw these patterned paper plates at Daiso. I put these together in our hotel room (see here), and once all the mini bundt cakes were eaten, to the trash the cake stands went. It’s basically a paper plate on top of a paper cup, but it did the job I needed it to do, and they looked cute while doing it! I’m not sure how it would hold up with a larger cake, but I think for mini ones like these, they worked great.

The cakes here are from 85 Degrees, one of our favorite local bakeries; one cake was chocolate chiffon, and the other vanilla bean chiffon. It was so light, fluffy, and mildly sweet. The cake didn’t come with the berries and cream, I just added that myself. My girls would agree that it complemented the cake nicely, and it was the perfect cake to use for our paper plate cake stands!

Brave’s still adores all things Spider-Man. When she started, we thought it might be a phase that would end, but it’s still going strong. Typically, she insists on wearing blue or red (with her faux black rimmed glasses like Peter Parker) to represent Spider-Man, but she’s been getting into Nancy Drew the past year, so she also tries to dress like a detective. What you get with Brave is a Spider-Man meets Nancy Drew kind of vibe.

We thrifted these t-shirts and thought it would go well together for a Spider-Man dress. I cut off the sleeves from the Spidey shirt for the dress top, and then cut off the bottom of the larger shirt to make the skirt. Next, I gathered the skirt, and then sewed them both together. It was my first try at this style, and I’m not completely satisfied. I think mostly cause I wish we found a larger Spider-Man shirt for the top to make a looser style of dress. I wanna try again soon, and once I get it exactly right, I’ll share the tutorial here. You can get a rough idea from what I did in the pictures above. I’m not super wild about this one, but Brave is, so I guess that’s all that matters!

She was so excited when I made this dress, and what she doesn’t know is the reason I made the dress. It’s all in preparation to go watch Marvel Universe Live, so the girls are going to get a big surprise this weekend! We will have to round up all our Spider-Man gear and get all the girls decked out, but I can’t wait to see their faces once we enter the arena. They will flip out from excitement, especially my Brave.

Marvel Universe Live will be going on at The Forum, which I haven’t been to in ages, from Friday, May 1, until Sunday, May 3. A special discount ticket offer is now available for all city of Los Angeles/Inglewood residents for Marvel Universe Live! If you’re local, you can receive 30% off tickets by using promo code: CITY in the offer code prompt on Ticketmaster. Click here for tickets. Offer valid through May 3, or while supplies last. This is a touring show, so if you aren’t local, it might be coming to a city near you. Just check out Marvel Universe Live for more info.

Eek!!! Ben and I can’t wait to surprise them!!! Now, I just have to make sure Brave doesn’t read this post before then (they like to read my blog).

This post is in partnership with Feld Entertainment as a Feld Family Ambassador; complimentary tickets for the show were provided. I’m always so thankful opportunities such as this, and also for the time you take to support me and this space.

If you follow on instagram, then you know our biggest girl just turned 9 this past weekend! I can hardly believe it! I remember the day she was born so clearly, just as if it happened yesterday. These past nine years have been really hard, but not because she’s difficult, but it has been a battle of fighting my own self-centeredness. I’m the difficult one. I have no clue how these kids live with me! Being a mother, at least a good mother, is a role that demands a lot of selflessness, and honestly, that doesn’t come natural to me. It’s taken a long time for my heart to understand denying myself, trusting in Jesus, and living out grace. Even still, I suck at it and that is precisely why I need more Jesus. Every single day goes like this… I mess up, ask for forgiveness, pray my heart believes the grace and mercy given at the cross, and things are fine and dandy, but then… boom! And repeat all of that about twenty times over.

I chose a pink fabric for her birthday dress because pink is her favorite color. I was going to do grey and something similar to my eye dress, but knew she would like pink much more. Just like the eye dress, I had initially planned to do a shift style, but with the girly glitter shoes she was going to get for her birthday, I thought a drop waist would be much more adorable. To make the nine tally marks, I just used black fabric paint and hand-painted them on. If you have my book, you know we are all about creating our own patterns on fabric. And of course, before you do any painting or sewing on your fabric, it is best to wash your fabric first. Next, iron it, and then go to town painting (or sewing). To heat set the design on, I allowed the paint to dry completely, and then press the fabric again to heat set in place (use some scrap fabric between in case any of the paint bleeds off).

Happy birthday my dear True! We love you whole heck of a lot! 

*I got the 9 sparkler from Nothing Bundt Cakes, but this one from amazon is similar.

I’ll never forget the first time we went blueberry picking (see post here). On the drive down to Temecula, Ben talked about his dreams of retiring and having a blueberry farm. While that most likely won’t happen, he is on his way to creating his own kind of suburban orchard in our backyard. Everything is still in the very beginning stages, but there’s a lot going on (the project list is long). The list of trees just keep growing and growing, especially after watching The Fruit Hunters documentary on Netflix.

Here we are about 7 years later from that first blueberry picking trip, and we no longer have to take a drive to pick blueberries. The girls just go outside and pick a bowl full of berries for breakfast! Ben wrapped chicken wire to go around the blueberry plants to keep the birds from eating them. Last year we did a rectangular PVC pipe cage wrapped with netting, but with the strong winds we get in our area, it would just come apart. The chicken wire stays in place much better, but some berries still get stolen away by the birds. Argh!

In December, while we were in Texas, things got unusually cold in SoCal and some of our blueberry bushes froze. Thankfully, they didn’t die, but they didn’t grow back a lot of leaves. We have gathered a good amount of blueberries, but with all the girls loving them so much, they don’t really last too long around here (see some of our harvest here and here). Ben and I barely get a handful because they devour it so quickly!