birthday

Sophie decided that for her birthday party this year she wanted to have an America’s Got Talent – themed party, so we put together “Cynwyd’s Got Talent,” complete with the four judges from the show. My parents, Becky, and Ariana all come up for the weekend. At the party all of her friends performed a talent, and it was too hard to select just one winner, so all were winners!

Here are all of the performers. We enjoyed dancing, singing, jokes, a piano performance, and a magic trick.

Here are the judges, Dave (pop pop) as Howie Mandell, Dave as Simon, Becky as Heidi Klum, and me as Mel B. We all did our best to get into character.

Sophie’s friend Dior was the host, playing her best Tyra Banks.
Lauren and Ari had a great time at the party too. Lauren did a ballet dance to a song from The Greatest Showman, and Ari did a dance and song on roller-skates.

That next day we had a family party with everyone.

  • The birthday girl!

It’s been a while since I made a cake, but was happy to get back into it again. Sophie requested a chocolate cake with a salted caramel buttercream frosting. It was pretty good.

Happy birthday to our sweet Sophie! It’s hard to believe that she’s 9 already. We’re going to do everything we can to enjoy this last year of single digits!

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The Friday before the holiday vacation Dave and I went to Bala House Montessori to celebrate Lauren’s birthday with a traditional Montessori birthday walk. Students hold a globe and walk around a candle that represents the sun the number of times that they are years old.

Here she is sitting with the candle before doing the Walk.

She also made a poster of her first five years of life that she shared with the class, and then she read everyone a story before Dave and I read everyone a story.

Showing her class the poster she made.
Reading to the class

In our house, on December 26th all of the Christmas decorations come down and we move right into birthday mode. This year was no exception. By the afternoon of the 26th all decorations were taken down and put away (in the newly organized basement, which was one of the many staycation projects we did over the break).

Unfortunately it rained all day on her birthday so we made the most of it and went to Jump, an indoor trampoline park. Lauren, Sophie, Lina and I all jumped. It was really fun. That night we did a family birthday dinner with the Sharps.

Birthday breakfast in her stylish birthday wardrobe.
This year unicorn was definitely the theme. Here she is with the second large stuffed unicorn she received, wearing unicorn earmuffs (missing in the picture are the unicorn mittens she also got)
Birthday cake with the family

The next day was her friends birthday party at Kids at Play, an indoor playground. About eight of her classmates came as well as Ava and Emma Devine and Kishore. We had the place to ourselves and the kids had a blast.

  • Lauren with some of her friends at Kids at Play
  • Cake #2

After Kids at Play her friend Teagan and Norah came back to the house. Sophie’s present to Lauren was giving her and her friends a makeover. I have to say, she did a very tasteful job.

The makeover salon
The party ended with a movie (Star Wars VI) and more pizza.

With three separate birthday celebrations she is now officially a six year old!

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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.

 

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