Birthday girl

Ida's birthday weekend was a weird one. She woke up Friday night throwing up, so we had to reschedule her Saturday birthday party. She actually felt great on Saturday and had no fever or anything, so her birthday request was to go bowling with only me--no one else allowed. Felt pretty good to be her companion of choice at the ol' alley. Not really sure what compelled her to choose bowling, since we have gone exactly one time and that was over a year ago at Grandma's. She had fun though!

On Sunday Hannah and Robbie came over for dinner. We remembered on Saturday afternoon that we had the missionaries coming over for dinner too. Ida's cake that day was apple crisp (candle stuck in an apple).

Also, she wanted to wait until Sunday to open her presents "so that Hannah and Robbie could watch." Favorite present was this beautiful little doll that Hannah made (which actually she had already opened on Friday).

 

We had her friends party the following Saturday instead; fortunately most of the kids who were originally going to attend could still go that day. We kicked the boys out of the house and it was girls only. The girls came wearing fairy costumes, played Pin the Fairy on the Flower (thanks Dawn!), put together fairy gardens, assembled magic wands to eat (strawberries and grapes on BBQ skewers with a star-shaped piece of cheese at the top) and finally had the chocolate "fairy cake," which I thought was terrible (thanks for nothing, Duncan Hines) but the kids sure enjoyed it.

I've never done a real friends party for my kids and I liked it that way (previous friends parties have been more along the lines of "invite everyone we know to the park and serve huge amounts of cookies" and "free tour of the fire department") but Ida was dying to have one this year, so I relented. This one was more involved because of the fairy garden prep, but I really enjoyed that part, which consisted of browsing through the local nursery for plants, and the dollar store and craft store for random little tchotchkes. So in other words, stuff I like to do anyway, and this time I got to do it in the name of Ida's birthday.

Love that girl.