Oakley’s 9th birthday party plan: Decorate houses. Eat cookies. Play soccer.
Oakley’s 10th birthday party plan: Repeat.
Welcome to flamingobear. We're the Martin family. Jenn cooks a lot. Tim eats it. And the trees are awesome.
Oakley’s 9th birthday party plan: Decorate houses. Eat cookies. Play soccer.
Oakley’s 10th birthday party plan: Repeat.
One thing I love about Oakley is that she just decides to do stuff. It’s not because she’s asked, or she feels she has to, she just decides to do something. This birthday card is a perfect example.
Nope, Oakley isn’t a six year old anymore… This sign of appreciation from Ms Drury’s class tells the story. Oakley is a wonderful little seven year old now.
Each year, my foodie wife is kind enough to our girls to let them choose exactly what they’d like to eat for their birthday (well, within reason). This year, she’s spoken with Oakley about it several times. When she asked yesterday, this was the response…
So I’ve changed my take on video for my kids. I really can’t be bothered to produce something, so I’m going for what I can do, which are sort of “moving pictures”, like Harry Potter or something. Here are a couple from Oakley’s birthday party. Nothing particularly meaningful at this point, but still a picture of reality if nothing else.
Enjoy.
Oakley’s Birhtday Party::Part 1 from Tim Martin on Vimeo.
OK, so I managed to go through the whole of Jenn’s birthday yesterday without taking a picture… Oh well, I’m sure she’ll be crushed.
As the girls wrote on countless banners around the house, “Happy Brithday, Mammoo!”
Aspen (with Oakley’s help) gave Jenn a really sweet gift. She took one of the sunflowers that had grown in the garden and harvested the seeds from it herself. No, they weren’t in great shape. But Aspen collected them and packaged them up and wrapped them herself. It was really sweet. (This was on top of the vegetables that she snuck out of the house to get yesterday morning.)
Aspen packed the sunflower seeds by placing them in a ziploc bag full of water (so they wouldn’t dry out), and then putting them in a gift bag, all several days before Jenn’s birthday. Somehow, and boy am I thankful, the two ziplocs both managed to stay closed.
Do you all know that seeds are best kept dry? Can I tell you now, that never, not once, has such a sweet gift smelled so incredibly bad? The smell literally knocked us all back as Jenn removed the ziplocs from the gift bag… and they were sealed! The odor was so bad we had to take them out of the house immediately!
So, happy birthday, Jenn. We do love you… enough to give you stinky gifts. (And thanks Aspen, for having such grace throughout the opening. Aspen laughed with us… she is so incredibly sweet.)
Lest they feel left out, Oakley and Lindy both brought sweet gifts for Jenn as well. Oakley’s cards are everywhere and very cute, and Lindy drew pictures of both Jenn and me, Jenn’s with far more hair than mine.
OK, so I intend to take pictures like this on every birthday, or somewhere around it. Here’s a starting point…We’ve had trees planted in the yard for each of the girls. Aspen’s trees are actually river birches, because Aspen’s just won’t survive the summers here, but Oak and Linden have perfect matches. Today, a quick shot of each girl with her respective tree.
Aspen’s party this year was a pretend sleepover at our house. As is our tradition, Aspen was allowed to invite six friends, and they arrived at 5 o’clock bearing sleeping bags and a stuffed animal. In addition to eating pizza, cake, and ice cream, we played several slumber party-ish games. We played musical sleeping bags, sleeping bag (potato sack) races, hide and find stuffed animals, and sardines, all under the light of the kids’ personal flashlights. We had a great time, and Aspen described the party as awesome.
Aspen’s guests were: Sean (gray shirt, standing), Oakley (pink shirt, standing), herself, James (next to Aspen), Ryan (next to James), Cassie (gray shirt under…), Brooke, and Vivian (at the far right).