Birthday Fun!

A lot has happened in the last month.  We moved out of our house the week before Christmas, which was pretty exhausting.  We moved in with Barnette and Cindy, which went well, but took time to get all our stuff organized and settled.  We headed to Fort Mill to celebrate Christmas, which was a fun whirlwind as usual.  And we came back home and got ready to celebrate Julia's 5th birthday.

In all the excitement of the move and Christmas and travel, I hadn't had the mental capacity to plan a big party for Julia, but she was happy to do a little tea party with the cousins and go out to dinner that night.  All was going smoothly till we got the call that the cousins had come down with the flu.  Julia was napping so I didn't have to break the news to her yet and decided to try to get some friends to come over and fill in for the cousins.  By the time she woke up, I had about 5 kids ready to party and she was fine with the change of plans.  Then as I fixed supper and made her cake, I heard Matt comment on one of Julia's eyes being red.  Sure enough, it was red and had some yellow stuff around it so we very sadly told the friends we probably couldn't have the party.  Julia said, "This is going to be the worstest birthday ever!"  But we held out a slight hope that maybe it wasn't pink eye and decided to wait and see in the morning.

This morning was dark and dreary and we slept in a bit.  When I made it up to see Julia about 8, her eye looked almost normal.  I was excited, but realized we had a party to plan for that morning, which I had done very little to prepare for!  And Julia reminded me that she had wanted egg and bacon muffins for breakfast, which I had forgotten and not made ahead of time.  So Barnette helped me make breakfast and Cindy and I scrambled to get the party food ready and all worked out just fine.

Before the party, Matt came home with balloons and we let Julia open her gifts from us--a sticker book, Merida and her mom dolls, and a big Elsa that sings, which Matt had picked out.  Well we have heard "Let it go!" more times than we can count today, but Julia was very happy with her new little friend.  She brought Elsa out to eat, thinking that "people" would want to see and hear her.  We did hear our waitress singing "Let it go" as she walked back to the kitchen.

Julia had a variety of friends come to her party--a friend from Sunday School and her siblings, a friend from small group, a friend she took ballet with and her sister, and the twin girls of my friend that does KNO with me.  It was a good group and the girls enjoyed playing with princess dolls for the first hour.

Then we ate and played some more.  The brothers wreaked a little havoc on the party when they started hiding from the girls, which caused the girls to run through the house chasing them.  Julia got upset and said the girls were doing things to hurt the brothers and she did not like that!  She loves those brothers.  One friend of mine and her daughters stayed late and Julia seemed happiest then, having someone to play with and a little bit of calm.  Earlier I found her sitting in a chair smelling her night-night, which must mean she felt a little overwhelmed.

She certainly felt overwhelmed with the attention she got at cake time.  She did not want to blow out those candles!  I gave her several options--someone blow them out with her, her blow them out, someone do it for her--and she wanted someone to do it for her.  I had plenty of volunteers for that job!

At the end of the day, she said her favorite part of her party was the dessert!  We had a nice dinner out and she opened a few more presents from family and headed to bed.