Emily's Big Day

Emily is officially seven! She has been so excited about her birthday for months, and she has been making invitations and writing lists of all the things that she wanted to do at her party for weeks. She had planned in her own six-year-old world a huge party for herself, and would have liked to invite just about everyone she has ever met. Being the mean parents that we are (not to mention our limited amount of space), we tried to talk her into scaling things down a bit, but in the end it really was a big party! Jim and I talked last night about just learning to accept the fact that Emily will always be the big party person--she just loves it! We decided that there is an advantage to that because if we let her do it now then when she gets to be a teenager guess where she will be hanging out with all of her friends--you guessed it--our house!! The advantage (although I admit there are disadvantages) to that is we will know where our daughter is and what she is doing.

This is what we did on Emily's great day:

It started out with homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast at Emily's request--we didn't eat breakfast until almost 9:30 and we were starving, but it was worth the wait (at least I think so)!

Then we moved on to finishing up the pinata--yes you can make a pinata over night, but it's not recommended. The kids all helped paint the pinata and stick the tissue paper on our odd-shaped heart. Here is the finished product:

Then Emily helped (or should I say I helped her) make her own cake--she mixed the cake up completely by herself and she frosted the whole top on her own. Didn't it turn out great? Much better than some of mommy's homemade cakes! Give her a couple of years and she will be our resident cake designer/decorator!

We fed people dinner--sandwiches on rolls (I figured that while I was making cinnamon rolls I might as well make four or five dozen rolls while I was at it, right?). The funny thing is when I put out dinner Emily asked me "Where's the turkey, mom? I said I wanted turkey?" She actually thought that with everything I did all day that I might actually have cooked the frozen turkey from our freezer that she wanted for dinner--ha!! I told her there was some turkey lunch meat and that if she wanted turkey that would have to do. She seemed satisfied.

The highlight for the kids and the lowlight for the parents (you're welcome Amy and Audra) was the pinata. Jim bought tons of candy for the pinata. Just to compare--remember our pencil pinata for the back-to-school party? A 5lb bag of candy pretty much filled the whole thing. Well, Jim bought two 5lb bags for the heart and it still wasn't all the way full! The candy was a spanish mix of "pinata" candy which consists of gum, jawbreakers, and suckers galore (not a mom's favorite candy.) Needless to say the kids have been eating candy all day and Amy has threatened me that tomorrow night the kids will be getting the leftovers at her house while Jim and I have our date night!! Anyways, back to the pinata--we went in age order, and it took a few tries to break it open . . . 

In the end our oldest pinata breaker, Allie, got it open. Everyone went home with a HUGE bag of candy (except Jaden who left kicking and screaming because he didn't want to go home)! It really was that much fun!

Finally, they blew out the candles on the cake, and I say "they" because it really was a collaborative effort! (Who's the birthday kid anyways?)

All in all it was a pretty good day. Some of us were pretty tired when all was said and done . . .

Being a baby is hard work!