March Maddness and Dump Trucks

As we all know, its March Maddness time and that is always fun. We decided to celebrate it by taking Kanyon to watch his daddy play basketball. Kory was playing in a tournament and my friend Lana was going to be there and I haven't seen her in forever so I really wanted to go. We are SOOOO close to the end of house arrest so we just decided to go ahead and bring Kanyon. This is Kory's last game/tournament so we didn't want Kanyon to have to wait ANOTHER year to finally get to watch his daddy play. We didn't know how he would do. Remember his first bball game to go watch?? ....
He did this the whole time:

But last night, he did AWESOME! He even clapped for our team some. The guy running the clock could NOT figure out the buzzer, so every time it buzzed, he couldn't get it turned off and klp didn't seem to be bothered. We had a great time visiting with Lana and her family and Kanyon loved getting to watch his daddy play basketball!! I think this day ranks right up there with the first ride with daddy in the tractor last summer.

Of course the real March Maddness is the NCAA tourney. We don't have cable but get several channels....CBS is not one of them so this is a tough time at our house. This is how we had to watch the games. It only comes in clear if someone is holding part of the rabbit ears. We tried to bring a bar stool over so whoever was holding it could sit and it didn't work!! UGHH!! The DTV switch is gonna kill us because we have the converter box and we get like NO channels....does anyone know about the antennas we should buy???!!!

OK on to something totally different. The big bday is less than a week away and the party is a week from today. I thought I'd show you our invitations. Its basically just a family party, so I decided to make the invitations since I wouldn't have to make that many. I like to kind of pick a theme just to give me something to do for the cake and invites. This year I went with dump trucks. I will admit that Mrs. Phillips (my teacher personality) had to come out a little to pull this off, but it was fun. I miss Mrs. Phillips sometimes! :)

I found a few pictures of dump trucks from my clip art on my computer. I kind of put different parts of them that I liked together and made the dump truck I liked. I wanted it to be boxier than these, but I liked certain parts of the pictures, so I kind of put them together and drew it out the way I liked it.

I traced over my pencil drawing with Sharpie and then cut the truck up into parts to make a template/pattern kinda thingy. I then traced each part on to a piece of paper. Each part had its own piece of paper because each part was a different color. I bought the colored card stock that I needed and I ran each different page with the patterns through a copy machine so that it would copy onto whatever color paper I needed it to be.
Here are the pattern pages that I ran through the copier. The top left I ran through on yellow, the top right on red, wheels on black, windows on blue....I didn't mean to make the lines on the dump part 2 different thickness...I meant for them to all be thin, but I accidentally used my big marker....no way I was going to re-do it just because of that.

Then my wonderful husband helped me cut them all out once they were coped.(even he got to go back to my teacher days when he would help me cut or glue stuff) Then it was just a matter of getting things glued on and putting them together. The worst part was the wheels because I had to cut out the circles, then I wanted them to have texture, so I used black shelf paper so I had to cut circles out of that too then glue them on top of the black paper tires. I used coarse sand paper and glued it on the back of the dump.

Everything is glued except the dump part I used a brad (found these cute colored ones at Hobby Lobby) in the bottom right corner so that the dump part would move.
So, you move it and see the invitation part. I really could've done better on this part, but I kind of ran out of ideas...this could totally be better, but it was fine.
All in all it was fun. I didn't factor the wheels/sand paper into the deal when I measured for an envelope. I bought the big greeting card ones and they were a little too tall so on the ones I mailed to our MT fam I had to fold the wheels a little which really bothered me, but I had to get over it. I kept the templates if anyone else needs a dump truck invitation!

I'm now working on how I'm going to do the cake...I think my mom and I have a good plan, but we'll see how it goes.