Happy Birthday Bitty!

There's My Birthday Girl.  Don't Mind the Bandage...she did a pretty awesome face-plant on the astro-turf at Seven Peaks Provo the evening before her birthday.  She was trying to give Bundle a piggy back ride on dry land, thinking that if she could do it in 3 feet of water then this should be easy.  Lesson Learned.

Bitty's birthday is at the tail end of summer - this year it fell on the day before school started and next year I believe it falls on the first day itself.  It's a really good thing because it uses up all that extra energy I have saved up from all my free time over the summer.  Wait, I think I have that wrong....yes, that's right.  Troy needed a shovel to scoop me up off of the ground and prod me into getting a birthday together for our little middle child.  But I pulled it off with no major complications.

We have decided (I can't quite remember why) to only do an official birthday party every other year - even years only.  On the odd years we thought it would be fun for the birthday kid to pick a couple of friends and go on an outing or special date of some kind.  Bitty and I talked about the options for most of the summer and she had a lot of ideas that came in a close second (like riding a helicopter to Disneyland.)  We ended up with a fun plan that almost didn't happen but I pulled it off at the last second.

With her two little friends as well as her sweet little sister who I knew would hate to be left behind we first hit a Cookie Cutters hair shop.  For a minimal fee (not as minimal as I had hoped, especially because I felt that their service was a little MORE minimal than I had hoped....but the girls had fun) the party goers each got a hairstyle complete with sparkly spray as well as a "manicure."  (They got their nails painted.)  So honestly it wasn't quite the birthday party I was hoping for but since I waited slightly too long to find a place to take the girls for Bitty's requested manicure I was pretty happy it worked out at all.

 Luckily we had other plans as well so after our hairstyle extravaganza we headed down town to a little tea shop called The Beehive Tea Room where we ordered hot chocolate all around.  It doesn't take much to make little girls happy - basically piles and piles of whipped cream spilling out of little silver tea pots will do the trick. Also birthday presents and little cookies and lots of giggling.

We finished up the day with dinner at our house with the grandparents.  Bitty, like her brother, is a seafood lover and initially requested as her special meal "fish, squid and seaweed."  I decided to take it easy on the grandparents and just serve salmon along with a salad and rolls or something like that.  Bitty was happy despite the lack of squid and seaweed and I was happy because she requested for her cake strawberry short cake.  Not a cake in the shape of the character Strawberry Shortcake, mind you, just a regular short cake with strawberries.  Yay!  I managed to make a huge mess out of it despite its lack of difficulty.  She got from her grandma and grandpa a big-girl jewelry box in which to keep her collection of earrings, and she was very excited about it.  It's lovely.

Happy Birthday my sweet wonderful dervish of a girl.  I love you madly and am already enjoying your eighth year immensely.