8th birthday

On December 28th, Lauren turned 8 years old!

On the morning of her birthday she did a scavenger hunt to find all 11 (!) of her birthday presents. The final present was monkey bars that Dave had made to attach to the swing set that we have in the backyard. She also got a hoverboard, which she rode on for most of the day (thank goodness we had good weather).

And for dinner we had (of course) pizza from Tony Roni’s. The Sharps came over for pizza and cake and a movie.

She picked out the cake and I made it – a three layered chocolate malted cake with toasted marshmallow “icing.”

This amazing, hilarious, active girls has brought so much joy to our lives over the last 8 years!

This weekend we celebrated Sophie’s 8th birthday!
On Friday Dave and I went into her classroom in the morning and read to the class (The Curvy Tree), and brought everyone pencils. We both worked from home so we could pick her up that afternoon. Around 1pm we started to get some crazy weather – rain had turned into a wintery mix with hurricane winds. Soon ice was falling from the sky and trees were falling all over the neighborhood. In the middle of making her cake the power went out! It was really scary. Dave and to go pick her up from school in the pick-up truck.

Lina’s family was in town from Sweden for the week and we had invited them to come over Friday night for dinner. We decided to keep the dinner on – we just had it over candle light. We have a generator so the fridge could still run as a few lights around the house. Dave cooked on the grill. Although we ended up eating pretty late, it turned out really well.

I’m kicking myself for not getting a group shot of everyone. This is the best I have.

We sang happy birthday to Sophie in English and then the Swedish crowd sang to her too. It was really fun!

The next day we had Sophie’s friend birthday party – which was a sleep under. It’s apparently the thing to do in second grade. The kids come over int he evening in their PJs, bring sleeping bags, eat pizza, watch a movie, and then go home before actually sleeping. It was great – the first year we haven’t had to rent out a venue!

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We started with a freeze dance party (link above). The winners went home with some sweet make your own soap prizes.

Then we did pizza from Tony Roni’s (of course)

Then it was movie time. Sophie picked Descendants 2, which is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but the girls seemed to like it a lot.

Half way through the movie we paused so everyone could make their own sundaes, which was a big hit. Since we did a cake the night before, Dave thought it would be fun to shake things up a bit – and everyone loved it.

We still had no power, but fortunately the generator ran the tv and music just fine. Sophie had a great time! Our lights came back on around 9pm Saturday night.

Here are a few shots of our house the day after the storm. The damage in our neighborhood was pretty bad, so we consider ourselves fortunate.

Cable lines were ripped off of our house and hung down over the road, so police came and put up caution tape. We decided to put up birthday balloons so people didn’t think they were driving into a disaster (which they kind of were).

A tree branch came down in the back and crushed two of Dave’s vegetable planters. He was bummed, but we were both thankful it didn’t land on the house.