Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Celebrating Audrey and Forest's birthdays!

While Audrey and Forest where with us for their Christmas break we celebrated their birthdays. Audrey turned 14 on January 1st and Forest turns 12 on February 17th. They are both growing up so quickly! We love them both so much and are so excited for them to come to Connecticut in August!

For their birthday Celebration, they picked chocolate cake with chocolate frosting for their birthday cake. You can't go wrong with chocolate, right? Here are some pictures of our celebration:

Forest and Audrey with their cake.

Close up of the cake.

The cake is lit. 26 candles in all can make quite the flame!

And they blew them all out!

Audrey's birthday gift...a volleyball! She loves to play!

Forest and his new chess set! He is so good!

Forest teaching Jake how to play chess.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO TWO TOTALLY AWESOME KIDS!

Did you know the Pez Factory was in Connecticut?

For any of you who know my husband well, you will know that he loves Pez. He's a huge collector and has accumulated quite a large collection of Pez dispensers. Well, when we learned that the Pez factory was in Orange, Connecticut (less than an hour away from us) we had to find out if we could go inside. When I first contacted them (March of 2011), they said they weren't open for the public but that they were working on getting a visitor center up and running for Pez fans. We were a little disappointed, to say the least. Well, about a month or so ago I got an email from the Pez factory saying they now had a visitors center that we could go to. We were so excited and decided we would for sure have to go! During the kids' Christmas break we were able to go visit. We were all excited about it but no one was more excited than Robb. Watching him exploring all the different Pez displays was like watching a kid in a candy store. Seriously. It was so fun to watch him. And the rest of the kids, too! As you can imagine, we snapped a lot of pictures. Here are some of them.

The front of the Pez Factory

Above the entrance to the visitors center was this really cool Pez sign.


Hanging from the ceiling of the entryway is this Pez motorcycle made by the Orange County choppers.

A giant size dispenser of the limited edition baseball pez dispenser. Of course Robb had to get one of these since it's only found at the Pez factory. Luckily, the one he got is not the giant size!

This is a view of the visitors center from the 2nd floor of the factory.

Throughout the center there were spots like this. Pez in the floor! The kids had fun with that.

One of the many vintage Pez pieces...

Oh. And look what Robb found. A BYU Pez dispenser! So cool!

BYU and U of U! Sadly, these weren't available to buy BUT we will definitely be looking for them to add to the collection!

Robb with his basketful of goodies.

The kids each got Pez buckets full of Pez candy. They could dispense whatever flavors they wanted. I didn't know there were so many different kinds!


Getting ready to leave after seeing so many cool things.

Outside the factory there is a bush that spells Pez. Another photo op!


And finally, when we got home, we took a picture of all that Robb bought. 17 new Pez dispensers! Oh. And notice his certificate. He took a Pez trivia quiz and didn't do too shabby!
We has a great time at the Pez factory. And now we can say we've been to Orange, Connecticut.