Sweet Baby Nene: birthday

Happy 8th Birthday, James!

Sneaky surprised us in his cupcake outfit, just for James! Actually, James remembered that Sneaky would come. He reminded me the night before which was good because I needed to scrounge up the materials!

I asked James to please smile nicely because we needed to send Dad a picture. Jim was out of town on the actual birthday day, and so we celebrated earlier that weekend. I knew Dad would want to see James looking EIGHT years old though!

For a birthday treat I picked up James from school. We were headed to ToysRUs for a quick purchase, using Sneaky's $8 and then we were going on a birthday date!

James greeted me with birthday wishes all over his tshirt. I'm glad his classroom recognized his birthday (they don't allow treats anymore..!)

After TRU, on to the Tavern! And calamari! And birthday kisses and selfies!

All of the Skylanders traps he scored at TRU. I may have gone overboard. He had his $8, I decided to chip in a bit and then if you spent $20 you got another free! Well, $25 later...

But he got the Kaos trap and ran into the house to show Sneaky! Luckily Sneaky was still there.

Birthday mail arrived! A gift card from Tía Kiki got many smiles! He quickly went on Amazon and spend that!

More birthday mail. Silly face!

My dear sweet baby is eight. It is hard to believe! He gives us so much joy and we know we are truly lucky to have such a sweet, kind, generous, smart, fun, sensitive, respectful, and loving young man as our son!

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Family birthdays

We have three family birthdays close together on my side of the family. We celebrated together this year and it was great!

My sister Ana and BIL Rich are great hosts. I took pictures of things around their house while they cooked us some grub. (get in my belly!)

#gnomebomb

James had already received his new iPod from his dear, generous parents so he kept himself busy while the adults got things done :)

After a fabulous home cooked dinner (no pictures, sorry) we celebrated with cake and ice cream. The three birthday peeps had the honors of blowing out the candles.

Chocolate chip cake (mine) and ice cream from Sebastian Joe's in Minneapolis. Omg good!

Tía ChaCha always gives the best books... That we end up reading over and over and over again :)

Thanks for a great celebration!

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8th Birthday Party

James originally told us that he wanted a Nerf birthday party, at home. This plan changed and he decided that he wanted his party at Grand Slam again. The invite list got longer because he has new neighborhood friends!

Jim found this cool Nerf cake topper! Perfect! So we had a Nerf themed party but at Grand Slam. I took it easy on the details because kids don't notice that kind of thing, I think it was just me that did :)

A neighbor friend, Chris, came over early to keep James busy until we had to leave. Skylanders, his new love.

From our invite list I think just one kid didn't come! 14 total with James!

They were quite the crew.

We had the party space for just an hour so we immediately the pizza, cake, and open presents. And then it was all play time!

George, a school friend.

Sawyer, a neighbor fiend.

First thing that the kids wanted to do was play laser tag. There was a huge line. James, seen here looking pretty sad, did not want to wait in line. I guess the birthday boy thought that he got special perks? Ha!

Well, he perked up. Some older boys recognize me from my school, and asked if the little kids wanted to team up with them. The older boys then divided the little kids up so that they had two teams to play laser tag. Pretty cool!

Bailey was the only girl at the party. Her twin is Sawyer. She didn't want to do laser tag so us girls hung out together and took a selfie :)

The scoreboard. The green team won! I wasn't sure what team James was on until I asked him later that night. Green team :)

I didn't get many pictures after laser tag. It was quite the challenge to keep all of the boys together and accounted for so Jim and I split up and just circled the place, watching them play in the ball pit, the bouncy area, etc. I really didn't want to lose a kid!