Natalie's 10th Birthday

Natalie's birthday started out harmless enough. I made her favorite breakfast--red velvet waffles and turkey bacon. She decided to squirt some double chocolate sauce on top of the strawberries over her waffles. She is of course drinking milk out of her shark cup.

I made the same amount of waffles I usually do, but we had eight more people here. My sisters and my mom were asking if there would be enough for the boys. Natalie, Patrick, and I had the same answer, "In our house, you snooze, you lose!" Luckily for the boys, most of the extra people only had small pieces, if any at all. Emily is apparently a big fan of red velvet cake too, so she probably enjoyed hers the most, next to Natalie.

Patrick picked up the cake from HEB at 10am. We thought they did a great job. They didn't have any shark-themed cakes, but we gave them a picture of a shark and someone hand-drew the shark on there. Natalie was excited about the cake, especially since it was red velvet cake. We also had shark paper plates and napkins, shark favor bags, and red cups (that we didn't end up needing). Of course Natalie had her red swimsuit and red swim goggles. Notice a theme here of "red" and "sharks"?

My niece Aly loves to go to the kids' weekly workshops that they have at Loew's and Home Depot, so her father John made some plans to do that here in town yesterday. My sister Melissa and her daughter Emily went too, and so did Eric. Natalie would have gone, but one of her friends was going to be dropped off at our house so we could take her to the party.

They had a Shrek theme and they made the dragon from the Shrek movies. John put his fingers in danger when he helped Eric put his together, hammering included. With Uncle John's help, Eric also named his dragon "Brother Carnivore". With a name so bizarre, I figured that John had a hand in it, although Eric is quite fascinated with the terms "carnivore", "herbivore", and "omnivore".

The party itself was scheduled at 11am. Luckily, I had made up extra party favor bags, because there were two extra kids that showed up that hadn't RSVP'd. I was happy they were there, though, because there had only been three that said they were coming. Natalie was very happy to see the others.

This was a swimming party at the Lifetime Fitness pool. As with many of these hosted parties, they gave us two "hostesses" or whatever they're called. We thought that maybe they would be giving the kids games and things to do, but they really didn't do anything. Luckily, the kids were good about finding their own fun. Of course, when the water slides opened up at 12:15pm, they kids were all about going down the slides repeatedly, even Eric. Look at that smile!

By the time the pizza got there at about 1pm, the kids were all famished. In fact, we had heard that the pizza was there about 20 minutes or so earlier, but for whatever reason, they didn't bring them all out until closer to 1pm. We hadn't ordered any extras because kids generally don't eat that much pizza at these parties. This time they ate a lot. With Alex and Anthony only eating two pieces apiece, the three large pizzas were gone. Those girls were hungry.

Some of my family went and got some Pei Wei later, mostly because they felt like having Chinese food. (My family "feeling like" having Chinese food is pretty typical.) Mom and Dad ate at the gym cafe. They wanted to come to the party, which I worried about because they whole party was outside and it was really hot outside. They ended up staying inside watching the Olympics on the big TV area in the front of the gym. They even fell asleep! Alex had wanted to stay home, but we made him go so he could at least help them out if they needed.

Despite thinking that I had taken care of everything, apparently there were two gas lighters and I brought the empty one. That meant that we couldn't light the red candles for the cake and that meant that Natalie didn't get to blow out candles. She isn't unhappy in this picture because she couldn't blow out candles. She is unhappy in this picture because I briefly suggested that she "pretend" to blow out candles. The two of us need to learn how to communicate better. I was actually fine with her not being able to blow out candles. I really wanted to take a picture of her with the cake! I could not get her to look up at me at all. :(

My consolation was that when we went out for dinner at El Mirasol (Natalie's choice, made completely independently of her father), Patrick asked them to bring a Tres Leches cake with a candle. I didn't bring my good camera, of course, but I did take this one blurry picture along with a video of her blowing out her candle.

Natalie had been playing all day with her cousins and after the party, she got to play with two of her other party guests at our house for another three hours. Surrounded by great friends and great family, her day ended up happily and so did mine. :)