Birthdays Birthdays Everywhere....

Megan's Pirate Ship cake. She helped frost this herself! Emilee did about 1/3 of the red stripes herself and a good portion of the blue area! I weas pretty impressed since it is pretty tedious work doing all of those frosting stars. And yes, this flag has 50 stars!

I'm pretty sure my children think Birthdays are actually Birthweeks. Megan's birthday is on January 12th, and Emilee's birthday is on the 16th. So we tell them happy birthday and mildly celebrate on their actual birthdays and then again with their party. All in all, we end up telling them Happy Birthday all week long! This year we did separate kid parties (neither of which landed on their actual birthdays) and a family dinner out to Azteca as well. So all in all we celebrated birthdays from the 12th until the 21st, and several times in between!

In the past, we've always had their parties together, since they shared a lot of the same friends (or their friends were siblings, etc). Since Emilee started school this year, she has some of her "own" friends so we did separate parties for the first time. Megan's party was first and was a total blast! She combined parties with a good friend that is only 12 hours older than she is (but different birthdays). The girls had a pirate party! It was so fun! They walked the plank, fished for pretzels with their "hooks", made spyglasses, played pin the patch on the pirate, sink the ship and pop the cannonball. Oh, and lets not forget the treasure hunt with a treasure chest pinata at the end! Tons of fun!

Emilee's party as the next weekend. I let her invite 12 of her friends, figuring that probably about half would show up. In fact, 10 showed up and that was only because one child was sick, and the other's parents had written the wrong day on the calendar! So it was crazy at my house, with 11 six year olds running around the house and boy are they loud! Emilee wanted an "American Flag" birthday so that's what we did. It was very unstructured, but that seemed to work best for those kids. They would have had fun just running around on their own for the entire time if I had let them! We had USA rhinestone tatoos, did an art project and played a couple of games. One game went well and one sank like a rock. The art project was great though! With how flighty the kids were during the second game I was worried they would be wandering, but every single one sat at the table for a good 20 minutes completely entertained. They also cracked jokes. "Hey, I'm a kid....so I'm in KIDnergarten" and then the entire table would erupt into shrieks...and I truly mean shrieks...of laughter. Then the next child would carry the joke on from there. "I'm a girl, so I'm in GIRLgarten" *more shrieks of laughter*. They continued with this until they had gone around the table about 3 times, each joke making less and less sense. "Hey, I'm American Flag, so I'm in American Flag garten." *more endless shrieks of laughter*.

Emilee made out with presents this year. Her oddest gift? She recieved a Bratz doll. You know how Barbies come with extra shoes sometimes? Well this Bratz doll came with extra feet!!!!! An extra pair of feet in different sandles came in the box. You just pop her old feet off and pop the new ones on. That's a little disturbing in my opinion.