2012 Week 40

Birthday flowers.  Happy birthday to me!

Surprise party with my friends - complete with blindfolded "kidnapping."

It was great.  I finally have a great group of friends here.

Daughter hard at work finishing off the birthday gift she made All By Herself (a small bag out of old jeans and fabric scraps - it's pretty impressive actually).
Between the people here in my family, my friends, and friends and family that called or sent messages I had so many things to be happy about on my birthday.  I'm very lucky to have all these great people in my life.

We finished up my birthday with dinner at Red Lobster.  Shopped for an outfit for myself at Kohl's.  Then dessert at home (cookies and cream pie).

At Girl Scouts this week we worked on art/craft bags for kids in the hospital.  Who knew you could overplan for something like that?  We completely ran out of time before we had all the mini craft kits put together. 

 And the big event - Kaitlyn's birthday party!  She wanted to have another slumber party this year so I insisted she keep it small.  The theme she picked was a spa party, which was a lot of fun to pull together.

 Kaitlyn was very specific with what she wanted to do for her party.  She asked her dad to make ham and twice baked potatoes for dinner, so he took the day off to cook.  I'm so glad he did as that allowed me to squeeze in craft day with friends in the morning (mostly I worked on final prep for Kate's party of course), then a friend helped me set up for the party before the kids got home from school.
We did dinner and presents first.  Then quickly did dessert so Kaitlyn could blow out her candles before everyone changed into pjs.  Kate had wanted an ice cream sundae bar for her party instead of cake so we used the brownies (which were one of the toppings) to do a quick tower for the candles.

 Kaitlyn, Bozena, Tori, and Emily - quite the little group of happy, enthusiastic, and VERY LOUD girls!

The girls had so much fun getting pampered.  We did facials, pedicures, manicures and decorated flashlights before they headed upstairs to play for the rest of the night.

 They stayed up pretty late, but most were in good spirits for breakfast (home made cinnamon rolls - again thanks to Dad and orange julius).  Then we pretty much spent the entire rest of the day doing nothing so we could recover from all the fun.

 

 We've had some fantastic fall weather lately so we took advantage of it Sunday afternoon and lit the fire.  We had quite a bit of scrap wood piling up (from building drying racks) so we let the fire burn for hours while we just sat around enjoying it.  And of course we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows for dinner.