Birthday Fun!

I love our spring and summer birthdays. When we had Joshua in June it made our birthdays all in the summer. June, July and August. I really wanted my next baby in May and was so excited when Sam was due on May 5th. Well, he had other ideas and decided to come a week early on April 28th. SO CLOSE! Then when we found out that Gabriel was due May 25th I was elated! This would be perfect - April, May, June, July and August!! I thought even if he was 2 full weeks early he'd still make his debut in May. I didn't plan on him being a MONTH early!! Little stinker! He decided he wanted the first birthday of the year and came a day before Sam on April 27th. So... though we skip May we do have all of our birthdays in the spring and summer which is so much fun. I posted about everyone's birthdays but never posted about the accompanying birthday parties that we had for their special day. Joshua wanted to take some of his friends to Wall-E on opening day so we had to wait for that to come out on June 27th. He took 7 friends and with Sam, Gabe, Mark and I we took up an ENTIRE row in the theatre. Every seat! Will chose to stay home and nap with our babysitter Jessica, which worked out SO nice for us. :) We bought 3 giant tubs of popcorn and every party goer got their own little drink. Then, when we turned in our tickets the guy gave all the kids a Wall-E watch! They were so excited! It was such a fun party, the boys all had a great time. We're so thankful that Joshua has such a cute and fun group of friends!

We also had a little family birthday party on his actual birthday. He requested brownies instead of cake and pizza (of course) for dinner. It was yummy!



We spent Mark's birthday at Ruby River for yummy steak with great friends and family. There wasn't really a movie playing that Mark was dying to see so we thought we'd play games or go bowling instead - we ended up just going home and playing RockBand for a little while and calling it a night since most everyone had a long drive home. For the record, Jeff TOTALLY rocked the microphone and got 98% on his first try! Shar and Dave were brave and sang too. I still haven't tried it, I'm too afraid I'd break the TV! :) Good job guys!


We had so much fun at Sam's birthday party too! He ended up inviting all the boys in his class and all his friends in the neighborhood and all in all there were over 15 kids (I can't remember the exact count but there were A LOT!) He wanted a Ben10 party and we played "Ben, Ben, TEN" (like Duck, Duck, Goose) and played pin the watch on Ben10. Everyone played outside for awhile and we had cake and ice cream. We bought Sam a new Ben10 watch and put it on his cake. He was SOOOO excited when he saw it. The highlight for the boys I think though was painting Ben10 shirts. We've had so much fun lately painting shirts (I'll post more details about that later) and the boys did SUCH a great job painting theirs. I went to take something to Sam at school the next school day and 3 of the boys in his class were proudly wearing their shirts. I was really nervous to attempt painting shirts with 15 six year olds but Mark came home to help and it went surprisingly well! We had such a fun day celebrating the new Mr. Six in our family!!

This is the video of Sam when he saw his cake and watch for the first time. We had to take it all inside to sing and blow out candles because the wind kept blowing the candles out for us!


I was excited to give Gabe his first real party this year and he was so excited too! He had a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse party and invited all of his cute little friends. It was only an hour and a half, but WHEW, that was long enough for nine 3 year olds. I made a mental note to myself that 3 is perhaps just a titch too little for a birthday party. I have some priceless pictures though of the little ones crying their eyes out when they had to surrender their presents to the birthday boy. Poor little guys! We had fun Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cupcakes and played some cute games. For the gift bags we did fun little buckets with shovels and treats inside.

Here is a video of us singing Happy Birthday to Gabe (please ignore the completely off-key singing on my part...I usually try to get out of singing when I'm taping, but since I was practically the only one there that knew all the words I had no choice.)

I think that about wraps up the birthdays so far. Will hasn't had a single birthday yet, but that will change on Aug. 24th when he will be ONE - holy cow, I really can't believe he's almost one, WHERE DID THAT YEAR GO?!!