more birthday!!!

OK.  This is going to be fast.  We are pretty busy right now.......

On Wednesday, I worked in the morning, but they let me leave a little early so i got to join Lew and the kids already eating their Happy Meals at school.  Then we shared popcorn with their classroom buddies.

After school, I gave them each one present to use for homework... they have to do 20 minutes of daily reading.  Carl got Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 and Gretchen got Frozen.  Both are the Junior Novelization of the movies.  If you are not familiar with this, it is the exact movie, word for word, movement/gesture for gesture.  Kind of fun to read before seeing a movie, but in all honesty, we always stop before the ending so we don't give it away for them before heading to the theater.  It isn't like reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before seeing that.  Or devouring Tolkien's The Hobbit first.  Since it is literally the movie in text, you aren't going to like the book better than the movie ever.  But, if you are 8 and have to do 20 minutes of daily reading, they are great!

 OK.  We are now at Birthday Dinner time!  A cheese pizza since tonight was a school fundraiser at a local pizza place.  They give a percentage of sales to our PTA, so we had to support them.  Pizza was just the icing on the cake, right?  Nope.  Icing to come later.  This was pizza!   Then, Gretchen wanted spaghetti.  Plain.  Carl wanted Spaghetti Dogs.  And, no meal is compete without something crunchy.  They love veggies!!!

 Carl's best gift reaction was to a tube of toothpaste.  "Mom, this is the flavor I wanted!  This! Is! Awesome!"

 This year, the kids each spent some of their own allowance money to buy the other one a gift.  Gretchen gave Carl a stuffed Ninja Turtle and he gave her a Hello Kitty mermaid.

 Perfect choices!  They know each other well!!!!!

 oops, cut the cats out of the shot.  I did take another one pulled farther back, but they didn't look as cute.

 Carl got Monopoly Empire and we played right away.

 Then we had dessert.  If you remember last year, I made Carl an ice cream "cake".  So, I knew he'd be looking for another one.  This year, I used characters from Frozen to decorate it.

 And, we had cupcakes for the rest of us!   mmm... cake!!!  

 festive decorations.  (hope they don't pull paint off the ceiling when I un-decorate)

The party's over.....