Elizabeth's 4th Birthday Party

This year's birthday theme was the Olympics.  Elizabeth was born on the day that the Beijing Olympics started, apparently the luckiest day in the Chinese calendar.  There were pros and cons to the this theme.  Cons - party supply stores do not believe in celebrating the Olympics, therefore no olympic decor.  Pros - since we are Team USA and celebrate our independence in July, red, white & blue item were greatly discounted!  I really wanted the kids to have Olympic tattoos.  The web did not let me down and I splurged on some that I found online.  Five days before the party I get a call from the director of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital saying she has receiving some really neat Olympic tattoos.  I probably should have told her to keep them and give them to the sick children, but I was in the middle of vbs and it was the only Olympic themed item I had gotten for the party.  She put them in the mail to me and I received them the day of the party.  Brandon withheld them from me when he got the mail Saturday morning and when he saw how sad I was he quickly whipped out the envelope, which brought a huge smile to my face!  I used my Cricut to make Olympic ring sandwich picks.  The main course was 5 sandwich rings.  Elizabeth choose her favorite sandwich as one of the rings, PB&J.  Brandon and I worked all Saturday morning preparing for the party.  We finally had decided on the games, something we really put off until the last minute!  The sky was cloudy and it rain was in the forecast, but it hasn't rained all summer, really what were the chances of rain on the day of the party?  Apparently, pretty good because as we had finished cleaning up the basement so we could do the bouncy house indoors, we walked upstairs to see the rain coming down!  Given the fact that we are in a drought, we certainly could not complain about the much needed rain.  So we thanked God for the rain and just went along with the day.  As it ended up we were able to eat and do presents and cake and by that time the rain had cleared and we were able to go outside for our Olympic games.

Just to recap, the food was Olympic sandwich rings, fresh fruit, fresh salsa and chips (so kindly made my by friend!) and a veggie tray.  Very low key, to say the least.  I actually went to bed feeling guilty that we hadn't done more.  The week before was just so busy that I was running out of steam, but we will make up for it on her real birthday!  The cake was going to be easy, just M&M's on top to make the rings, but a few days prior I decided that we should do a five layer cake (one for each color ring).  I baked the cakes on Friday (after the sleep-over!) and Brandon was a huge help decorating on Saturday morning.  I used Aunt Sandy's frosting recipe, which is awesome and used the Viva paper towel trick to make the frosting look like fondant, or in our case, more like fondant (not perfectly smooth, but for a first attempt, not too bad!).  Honestly, I was just glad the cake didn't fall over!  Brandon put the rings on top, but then added an additional "USA" on one side and gold #1 medal on the other side.  Secretly I think he enjoyed decorating the cake.  He and his mom did an awesome job cutting and serving this monster 5 layer cake too!

Our neighbor's 12 or 13 year old son entertained the kids at the kids table.  I am not really sure what he was saying but the kids were in stitches.  When Gavin left he said to his mom, "that guy in the blue shirt was soooooo funny!"  Nicholas was a real crowd favorite!

The Games: I had prepared an Olympic Trivia Quiz for the adults, but failed to get a prize.   Luckily, I think my mom won and was more than understanding!  I did have a pretty new ball point pen for her, but still kind of lame on my part!  We had a water balloon toss between spouses and amazingly the balloons only bursts on the women!  The first game we did for the kids was filling up a glass container with water until it over-flowed.  We did a water balloon toss into the baby pool that had a hula hoop inside of it.  But the favorite game was the water gun squirt game.  We turned over a two solo cups (I had glued on some red, white & blue ribbon to dress it up a little!) and put it on the kids picnic table and  let the kids compete to shoot water at the cup to knock it off the table.  The kids loved it and the looks on their faces were priceless!  We had some very intense competitors!

showing off the tattoos

Elizabeth got a lot of really nice gifts.  She is really enjoying her name games and books.  Our neighbors closed down the evening with us complete with a trip to Pizza Hut.  The party ended when all three kids melted down at the same time.  It was one of those moments that we just all had to laugh.  Elizabeth was literally crying, "I'm so tired!"

It was a little odd celebrating her birthday before her birthday, but we had an awesome day and she had fun.  We keep our birthdays pretty low key and try to make it about our friends and family being just being around us.  When everyone sang to her and it was loud and so many different voices, I couldn't help but think how truly blessed we are too have so many wonderful people in her/our life.  My mom always does a slideshow/movie of the kids from the last year.  It is so much fun to look back at the pictures from the last year.  Mandi did one this year too of pictures of the girls and our families.  Truly some of the our most cherished moments and what an awesome way to capture them.