Birthday Party

Birthdays are important and are meant to be celebrated.  In our house it's mostly just us girls that like to celebrate because Chris would like nothing better than to have his birthday pass without anyone noticing.  Julia starts planning her next birthday party the day after her party.  It's a topic she talks about frequently throughout the year.  She also loves to throw parties for her stuffed animal's birthday and we have even made cupcakes, bought balloons and made cards for those parties!  Emma loves to be surrounded by people which makes parties a big hit for her.  She also loves to look at pictures and watches her yearly birthday videos A LOT!

This weekend we celebrated Emma's 4th birthday Emma style - surrounded by family and friends!  I always love parties at home - it's nice to include all the children in a family! - which works better for the October birthday than the winter months so we had the party at our new house.  The weather was picture perfect and we were able to hold most of the activities outdoors, giving the children a lot of space to spread out and play and burn off some of the sugar from the party.  I've learned that I enjoy the parties much more when we keep it simple.  No fuss food, a great cake, face-painting and a few games.

Emma loves musical chairs.  I found this out at a local restaurant family night where she squealed and laughed when we joined in the fun.  So we had to have a fun game of musical chairs today.  Most of the children had a lot of fun with the game, but it was hard for some when they needed to leave the game before they wanted.  We also had a pinata filled with candy.  This was the first time we had one and it seemed to go over well.  Emma has a very silly sense of humor and whacking a cute colorful donkey is her idea of entertainment!  (Or, rather, watching the other kids whack the donkey is fun but she wasn't as interested in it when it was her turn.)  The kids especially loved it when the candy came out and I'm hoping they didn't eat it all at once or their parents might not come for our next party ;-)

For Emma, the highlight at any birthday party is singing Happy Birthday.  She just loves that song and enjoys it even more when she is the center of attention.  If you ever want to see huge smiles whip out the Happy Birthday song in Emma's company and you won't be disappointed!  This year's party theme was the colors of the rainbow and so I made a rainbow cake and used candles that had colored flames.  The cake was a hit with everyone (even though it was a bit trickier to make than I expected) and there was lots of frosting among the six layers to satisfy the birthday girl.  As you can see in the photo below, Emma dug into the frosting even before we sang to her and she loved it!

We are truly blessed to have so many family members and friends help us celebrate Emma's birthday.  Thank you to everyone for making the event so special!  And a super special thank you to my sister for providing the great face painting!