Photos of our day

Seven candles for my seven year old girl

She loves her MP3 player. It has a feature on it that allows you to record. So most of today, Lael has been recording herself, her friends, the dog - everything. Here she is listening to it on the porch earlier this morning.

Then we went to pick up her friends. They played dress-up for awhile.

Then went back outside to run around and play.

And they drew on their faces with sidewalk chalk ...

A table set for a special barbecue dinner for our special girl. All her friends thought it was so fun that everything was "fancy."



We have a growing tradition with our birthday cakes. The girls give me an idea as to what they want and then I frost it after they go to bed the night before their party. Its a surprise as to what the final product will be. So Lael told me she wanted a white frosted cake with a pink flower on it. I got the white frosting done with no problems. When I started to pipe on the pink frosting, the icing bag exploded. All over the white, clean, flat, frosted cake. I recovered it well enough but it was not how I'd pictured the cake looking. She liked it and it tasted good. That's all that matters.



Smiling and anxiously awaiting a piece of cake!


Cutting and serving on more "fancy" dishes. I even broke out my china and crystal. The girls loved it!

And Lauren just followed everyone around all day .... She was watching the girls play outside while munching on some cheerios. Can't you tell: :-)

Overall, I think we all really enjoyed our new birthday celebration tradition. It was relaxing, easy and so very fun to sit down and talk with Lael and her friends. I enjoyed it so much. They are a great bunch of girls, the kind of friends we want our girls to have for years to come. So sitting and enjoying dinner together, while being able to really focus on talking to each of them, how they interact with each other and how they respond to us as the grown-ups was just really nice.
I had a good birthday. The two hour nap I took in our air-conditioned bedroom helped too.