The Birthday post

I'm a little sluggish on posting about the actual birthday party. Sorry. We've been recovering from our weekend out of town (why does it take two days to unpack and clean up from a two day trip?), and getting ready for Thanksgiving. Mike's parents and his brother Steve and his girlfriend are coming for the big day-o-turkey so we're shining and tidying. You know the drill.

We went to Philadelphia to visit our dear friends over the weekend. The drive was about 6 hours but fortunately Mike and Rae live right on the route so we got to stop and run around (the kids, not us). The kids were great road trippers. Neither of us felt like selling them when we arrived which is always good. Emma was so excited to go to "Maddy and Sylvie's house." We had a good Saturday of hanging out and visiting our favorite mall- King of Prussia. It's the third largest mall in the U.S. and the best (by my standards). We spent many a dates in King of Prussia and we always love the Christmas decorations. Mike had a cheese steak with cheez wiz and mushrooms (his favorite which is almost impossible to find outside of Philly).

Jordan, who used to be much shorter than me and is now towering over me at over 6 feet tall went to Target with Andrew and I to pick out our pinata and the stuffing. We always have a pinata in our "family" parties. It's a tradition.

Emma thought the pink butterfly pinata was pretty cute.


After a lot of hard work we broke her open.


All that was left hanging was her sweet pink head.


I guess bludgeoning a poor pink butterfly to death isn't Emma's idea of fun.

Don't worry she cheered up when she saw there were lots of M&M's and little jars of play-doh to put in her party bag.

In the hullabaloo of trying to convince Emma it was a GOOD thing the pink butterfly was now just a hanging head and her insides were spread all over the garage (it was only about 35 degrees out) Andrew scurried his baby self over to the candy as fast as he could and was eating up smarties off the ground at lightening fast speed. His little paws were FULL of candy. He loved it.



We opened some presents (there were many) Emma has been very busy playing with all of them. Here are the Little Einsteins puzzle and a new Unicorn and Pegasus toy. Can a girl have too many unicorns? I don't think so. We also got a see and spell by Melissa and Doug which she has done surprisingly well at. It uses all lower case letters to spell words on puzzle boards. She's even got "g" "d" and "b" down which I think are hard. She got lots of new animals which she hasn't put down for more than a few minutes. A bengal tiger family, giraffe family, panda family and lion family. It's getting very wild around here.




Then we had the cake. I felt like such a lame mom because I didn't make her a cake but as everyone gobbled up the Baskin Robbins polka dot ice cream cake I didn't feel badly anymore. They probably wouldn't have gobbled mine up as quickly.

(This is her telling Pam and David how old she is now.)

We had a most delicious dinner and headed home. We didn't get home until 11 p.m. but the kids slept much of the trip. We had such a great weekend away and we're looking forward to a longer visit with our favorite clan next month. (Where there will be a helicopter pinata)