Birthday Week

We are in our second birthday season of the year.  Elinor, Bethany, and Faith have their birthdays within a month of each other starting in February.  Now it's time for Clark, me and George-- we're the July birthdays.

 Clark turned 13 on Thursday and Bethany and Elinor made him a cake, but I claim credit for the remarkable decorating on the cake.  Stunning isn't it?  That's a lizard-- you could tell that, right? 

Clark did his big overnight backpacking camping trip last weekend, so we just enjoyed a nice, quiet evening at home watching the newest Muppet Movie.  We love the Muppets!

Bethany and Elinor bought Clark a Lord of the Rings Lego set and a candy bar.  This has put them both in Clark's good graces for which we are all grateful.

Abe and I gave him a box of trash bags and an assortment of tape.

What?  Is that weird or something?  Isn't that what every 13-year-old boy wants for his birthday?

That really is what he wanted!
He's rebuilding his basement space camp and he needed these supplies.

 He also got a remote control helicopter he has wanted for a while.

It's already not working.

Maybe it just needs new batteries.

Tomorrow is my 35th birthday and I threw myself a birthday party this evening.  It was a kickball birthday bash!!  We met up at the diamonds where the girls play softball. 

Abe and I were the team captains and we chose teams playground style.  It was brutal, but this was an adults only, show-no-mercy game.  If the players couldn't handle the stress of picking teams, this game wasn't for them!  We were out for blood and there was in fact some blood involved.

This was most of my team-- a few others came later so they weren't in the picture. I guess we were the "B" team.

Here's Abe's team.   They were the "A" team.  "A" for Abe, "B" for Betsy.  You'd think the A-team would be a better team than a B-team.

You'd be WRONG!

Ha ha!  My team skunked Abe's team!!  

Okay, technically we played two games and we each won one.  So I suppose we tied, but our first win was so dramatic that I think we were just the better team:-)  And now you can see why this had to be an adults only game.  I didn't want the children there to hear all the trash talking we did (I did).

Abe got me a donut to put a candle in so the gang could sing happy birthday.  I felt so loved!

As it turns out there is actually a league called the World Adult Kickball Association.  We were pretty good tonight-- I think we might try to put a team together and compete around the world.  We'll leave our families behind and just travel the world playing kickball.

Thank you to good friends for making my birthday celebration so much fun!