Sunday, August 07, 2005

Fiona is four!















The revelry is finally over. Fiona turned four on Thursday and somehow this turned into a very BIG birthday. Like she got her driver's license and had her first communion and graduated from high school and could finally legally drink and got engaged all in one big celebration. I think everyone is feeling that she needs to be especially showered with love this year since the interloper moved into her life. The birthday in pictures:

Opening the mountain of gifts. UPS just kept coming back with more and more and more and we could barely move in the house without stepping on presents.















On Friday, we were supposed to go have a special big girl tea and Fiona and Gramcie got all dressed up in their tea party finest. Little did we know, Friday was bad luck day. I got lost on the way to the tea place, Amelia started screaming and wouldn't stop, we hit construction, then a delay on the freeway because of the Blue Angels performance. We finally just went to the Jack in the Box drive through and came home and had our "tea party."















We walked out to the yard to take pictures at least and right before this was taken, Gramcie got stung by some sort of evil insect that gave her a skin infection and swelled up her entire arm. She's on antibiotics for ten days now. Nasty, nasty bad luck day.




















Saturday was the big birthday party blowout. Gramcie made the incredible castle cake and I made a play castle out of cardboard boxes.





























We ended up with 6 kids attending between the ages of 1 and 6, plus all their parents and my great aunt. Of course we had to put together themed favor boxes and provide princess hats for the girls and crowns for the boys. Andre was going to do a simple barbecue of hamburgers and hotdogs, but ended up adding a full menu of appetizers and sides like pesto pasta salad and bleu cheese potato salad. Needless to say he spent several hours cooking before the party and then spent the entire party food wrangling.

We had several activities planned, but with the wide age range of the kids the only things that really worked were the "king's treasure" hunt and the pinata. The rest of the time we just let them run around on the lawn. I think at one point Fiona was making everyone pretend to be puppies, but I'm not sure.






























We finally got through the full party agenda by 8:30 pm, just in time for all the kids to start melting down from exhaustion and sugar crashes. I'm sure their parents loved us. Next year we are totally going to Chuck E. Cheese or something, throwing a party is hard work. I hope Fiona had a good time and I think we've thoroughly made up for bringing in the competition:





Don't even think about a princess party Amelia, I'm done.