Six Years Old

It's had to believe, but my baby is now 6 (and I'm 36 as of today, which is also hard to believe).  As per our usual custom, Seth and I woke Evie up on her birthday by singing the "Happy Birthday" song to her.  Then Seth had to go to work, but I took Evie out for donuts.

Evie had Nature Camp, so I dropped her off and then joined her again after lunch with cupcakes for her group.  Then in the evening, we went to my parents' house for dinner.  I made spaghetti and we had brownies with ice cream for dessert.

On Saturday, we had Evie's birthday party.  We have been talking about this for months and spent a lot of time thinking up activities.  We had had her birthday party at a gymnastics studio the last 2 years, but I was ready for a change, so we explored the idea of picking just a few friends to do an activity at another place, but Evie didn't want to have to choose friends.  So when I started seeing ideas for a messy party, I thought that would be the perfect thing to appeal to all the age ranges we had to entertain if we included the siblings of Evie's classmates and friends.  We decided to have her party outdoors at the church.  We had so many activities for the kids:

• 2 slip-n-slides
• 4 kiddie pools, 1 with pool noodle slices to fish out with nets, 1 with sponges to (gently) throw at each other) and 2 to wash off/splash in
• homemade mud with toy cars to drive in it
• homemade sand with shovels and sand toys
• a vat of jello with rubber toys suspended in it that the kids had to dig in to save from the mire
• dinosaurs frozen in blocks of ice that the kids used spoons to chip away at
• pool noodle pieces and shaving cream that let you build a tower
• sidewalk chalk
• a roll of parchment and paint
• Pie Face

We also made slime, played limbo, and then hand "sand" and "dirt" cupcakes.  I was especially It was a lot of work, but so much fun.  I think everyone had a great time.

Evie is so taken with baby Lydia

Making slime

"Sand" cupcakes: vanilla cake, white icing, crushed golden Oreos as sand, blue sugar sprinkles for water, and Swedish fish candy

"Dirt" cupcakes: chocolate cake, chocolate icing, crushed Oreos as dirt, gummy worms

There was a lot of excitement at the party, so there was a lot of napping afterwards (for Evie, anyway, I had to go see a patient).  Then we went to my parents' house for dinner with my parents, my grandmother, and my aunt and uncle.  I made mexican food and birthday cake.  Evie wanted her cake to be a surprise, so Seth and I had ordered a chocolate cake and had it decorated to appeal to Evie's love of cheetahs: cheetah ribbon border and a cheetah print number "6".  

We had a great time celebrating her birthday multiple ways and multiple times.

Sunday morning in church, one of the hymns was "Amazing Grace".  That song gets me every time because my grandfather used to sing "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a Krech like me" and I sing it that way too, which chokes me up.  Evie was standing next to me and wasn't looking at me, but must have somehow sensed I was crying because she turned to me for me to pick her up and just hugged me around the neck as tightly as she could.  She herself is amazing.

On the way home from lunch after church, Evie informed me all about the life cycle of a frog, including when they turn into "tadapoles".  Guess she learned a lot at nature camp.

This week, she's been a Cheer and Pom camp at the JCC where she went last summer.  They do cheer and pom activities, but they also swim twice a day, so she's getting her summer tan and having a good time.