Birthday Season: CLOSED.

All five of my kiddos are born within six months of a calendar year.  Bentley begins it at the end of September and then we have Ryder in November, Camille and Kendra in February (nine days apart) and we wrap things up with Colton in March.  Then we get a bit of a breather for the next six months!  (Craig and I are both July birthdays, but I don't find our special days nearly as stressful, probably because we don't require parties...)

I don't feel like I'm very good at birthdays.  I want them to be wonderful and special days, but buying gifts gets complicated, trying to coordinate between two sets of grandparents and myself, and trying to figure out when to celebrate as a family and when (and if) to have a party all sort of overwhelms me.  And even when I do manage to have parties, I don't do any of the awesome theme ideas that some people do.  I pretty much invite people over (which is super complicated now that my kids have school friends who I don't know how to contact) and make a cake for the occasion.  We try to have some games planned, too, but in this Age of Pinterest, my parties are laughable at best.  I tell myself that I'm just setting the bar low so everyone else can feel awesome in comparison.  Such a service I'm rendering!

Anyway, I don't think I ever managed to blog about ANY of my kids' birthdays, so I'm doing that now, in one long photo-riddled post.  Enjoy!


For Bentley's birthday, we let him invite a couple of kids from our neighborhood to a trampoline park!  This turned out to be very complicated, because the park was super close to Craig's work, but about 20 minutes from our house.  So I drove everyone to Craig's school with the idea that then Craig would take the boys jumping.  But I forgot to grab a change of clothes for Craig (in hindsight, that should have been HIS job), so then I got to drive home, get the clothes, and drive back to the trampoline park, before returning home.  So that made for over an hour of driving for me and the other kids.  Fun!  (Craig took lots of videos at the trampoline park, but no still photos, so you don't get to see that.  Blame Craig.  And his love of taking slow-motion video!)

Craig grabbed some pizzas for everyone after that and we all met back up at Carter Mountain, where it was their last Thursday sunset with Live Music for the season.  This meant that all of Charlottesville was trying to get there, and we spent at least 20 minutes just getting into the parking lot and nearly missed the sunset!  But we made it and even found a spot on the grass to sit and enjoy our pizza and the music.  We got peach doughnuts and peach ice cream, too, while we were there, and it turned out to be a lovely (if exhausting) evening!

Sunset on Carter Mountain

Charlottesville at night

Presents from Grandma and Grandpa!

Ryder's birthday was a little more low-key, since it was just a couple days after Thanksgiving.  It is nearly impossible to get up the energy to make a birthday cake right after Thanksgiving.  But we had a friend come over to play and I dutifully made him a cake, even though we were still working our way through all our pies.  We did get him an enormous teddy bear from Costco which he'd been begging for every time he laid eyes on them, so he was pretty excited about that.  Following in my family's tradition of coming up with the lamest names ever for things, he has named it Big Bear.  He insists to me that Big Bear is his brother.

Big Bear was too big to wrap, so we just stuck a bow on him and propped him up in our room.  Ryder likes to wake up incredibly early and then come wake us up and demand that we get him breakfast.  So we knew this way Big Bear would be the first thing he saw and we wouldn't miss it!  And that plan worked perfectly!

All ready the night before

Look at that sleepy smile!

And celebrating with grandparents

For Camille, we enjoyed getting to give her her first cupcake.  She wasn't too sure about the whole thing.  Then a week later we did it again with grandparents and she was much more enthused the second time around!  I was totally lame and bought her new sheets for her crib.  But I figured we were due some after eight years!  I really should have bought her some new sleep sacks, instead, since she still loves those so much...  Maybe when the weather gets hot she'll finally stop needing those to sleep...

Round 1

And Round 2!

Modeling her new dress from Aunt Leah

Scoping out the bathtub (one of her favorite things to do)

Kendra got a full on party this year: six extra little girls running around the house giggling plus a piñata.  I was terrified of how it would all go down, but fortunately Craig managed to come home early and help out.  (This was especially fortunate since Ryder spent a good chunk of the party in his room sobbing and Camille insisted that I carry her everywhere I went.)  Kendra wanted her theme to be "nature" and wanted to go on a nature walk, so I had to explain that the middle of February was not an ideal time for nature walks.  Instead we gathered all the stuffed animals in the house and hid them for the girls to find-- sort of like an Easter egg hunt-- and called it a "safari."  It turns out stuffed animals are a LOT harder to hide than Easter eggs, but everyone had fun anyway!

That's a LOT of little girls in our house!

Pulling strings on the piñata (I didn't want to try for the baseball bat kind...)

Also, Kendra got a desk and chair from Grandma and Grandpa, which she was hoping for.  They were a huge hit, and I love how they look in her room:

Why yes, IKEA does rock my world!

And then Colton's birthday was pretty low key, again.  We'd ordered a spaceship toy by Imaginext and he opened that on the actual day and enjoyed everyone calling and singing to him.  (If they didn't sing right away, he'd say, "You going sing me?") and since his birthday was on a Sunday this year, his nursery leader had brought cupcakes for his class, which I thought was very sweet of her!  At church, Craig wished someone a good week and when the man responded with, "You, too!" Colton immediately corrected him with, "No, I three!!!"

The next week, we celebrated again with Grandma and Grandpa and more presents.  We tried to eat out, but apparently the Red Robin in Charlottesville is terrible, because we were there for over two hours before we finally got any food.  (And, my guacamole burger didn't have any guacamole on it, but by then I was too hungry to complain.  I didn't even noticed until I was nearly finished...)  Next time we'll just order pizza.

So those were the birthdays around here!  Nothing super amazing, but they were happy and we're glad our kids are growing and thriving like they ought to!

Now I can relax until September!