Happy Birthday, Camille!

This girl-- she just cracks me up all the time.  The other day I was folding laundry and I looked out the window and caught a glimpse of her riding her scooter to her friend Scarlett's house, her arms spread eagle wide in the breeze, looking very triumphant and full of life.  She is a sight to behold.  She has so much love for everyone and everything in her life.

I had to take one last picture of her before she turned 8.  So here she is, still 7 for a few more hours...

We had about three days of celebrations, as we tend to do.  Her actual birthday was fairly low-key: she opened presents before school, I made her dessert of choice (red velvet s'more brownies) in the afternoon, and for dinner she wanted grilled cheese and tomato soup!  She spent a chunk of the day on the phone with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins calling to wish her a happy birthday.  And before bedtime, we started a family air hockey championship, complete with brackets and double-elimination!  It felt very professional.  (I have lost each match so far; I wish I could say I was going easy on Camille because it was her birthday, but she totally beat me fair and square!)

Camille is in the throes of that ugly smile stage that most kids go through, so I get really excited when I capture a legit, cute smile!

On Friday we met Grandma and Grandpa at Mission BBQ for dinner, and got Coldstone after!  And then-- the moment Camille had really been waiting for-- presents!  

Camille made a point of telling the staff that it was her birthday, so they brought her a dessert.  She knows how to work the system!

Her main present was a hoverboard, which she was THRILLED about and has been riding around the house ever since.  Bentley overheard her yelling, "I'M NEVER WALKING AGAIN!!!"  

And THEN, on Saturday she had a party.  And it was kind of a disaster, but it's fine and over with now so I'm not going to worry about it.  (Part of me is a little embarrassed since I feel like working for a wedding planner means I should be better at organizing things like this, and nearly everything that went wrong could easily have been avoided if I'd thought things through better.  Live and learn, I guess...)  Mistake #1 was that I planned for the party to be too long.  Camille wanted to watch a movie, so I wanted to give her time to play AND watch the movie, but that was a mistake.  We should have just had two hours and no one would have cared if there wasn't enough time for the whole movie.  Mistake #2 was inviting WAY too many kids.  Thirteen second-graders trying to play Capture the Flag (or any game other than Duck, Duck, Goose, as I quickly discovered) is going to go badly.  You'd think I would know that by now???  And Mistake #3 was inviting a few boys from Camille's class who are just NUTS.  Every time I turned around, they were popping balloons and wrestling each other and were just awful.  Next year she's only inviting girls.

But still.  We played games.  Camille opened presents.  The kids ate pizza and doughnuts and drank root beer (one girl hilariously asked me if the root beer was okay for kids-- I loved that she checked!) and some of them watched The Greatest Showman, and we all survived and that was the last party I will ever throw for a bunch of second graders, so check that off the list!

Happy birthday to my baby!!!  Camille sure makes our family more fun!