Friends have birthdays too

James was sad to have missed Grandma Rose's party (we'll have to re-celebrate!) but we did make it to his friend Gavin's party on Sunday. They held it at their development's club house, like a party room.

James and his buddy Luke open their party bags and play with favors.




Gavin's family rented a Tumble Bus and it parked in the lot outside. It's a converted school bus that has tumble mats and obstacles inside. All but two of the bus seats are removed.



James isn't in the picture because he refused to participate. He mostly watched. He did want to jump in the ball pit and they let him. I was disappointed by my shy guy but he makes the most of it.

There was a zip line that went from the back of the bus and has the kids land in the ball pit. The owner was very careful about kids landing and not on top of each other.

James' (former) teacher Kathy got James to wander to the back of the bus. He never jumped on the zip line or climbed on much, but he played with balls and laughed with his friends.

We went back into the clubhouse about 10-15 minutes before the rest of the crew because James became obsessed with cake. He kept asking, "when are we having birthday cake??" Eventually we did. There was also a Spiderman pinata!

James' girlfriend Kailtyn can swing!

I finally convinced James to take a turn but he wouldn't swing without my help. I only snapped this picture of him waiting for me. Oh well :)

Here's the birthday boy, Gavin, in his Spiderman costume. Oh, and "Russell Bustle" (gray sweatshirt) in the background. He's the overactive kid that is EVERYWHERE. They call him Russell Bustle because he's always on the move, always up to something!

CAKE!! Finally. And Russell has a front seat.

As we were leaving James wanted to take cake home. He had his piece and mine, so I just refused to ask for more. You can't ALWAYS have cake. Well, except when you back to our house. We had some plain chocolate cupcakes that didn't make it to ChaCha's. We had one after dinner :)

James was gone from his school for quite a while. He has a folder that we empty out every day with the day's announcements and artwork to go home. I hadn't cleaned it for a while and so we had quite a pile of papers and artwork accumulated and here are some of the Christmas/winter crafts from the daycare displays and walls, I think.

Tissue paper mitten.

James' stocking. It hung at the "fireplace" in his classroom. Sorry, I can't figure out how to turn this picture. ARGH. But at least we made James' Christmas dreams come true :)

Cotton ball snowman.

Handprints. I believe that the bottom set are this year's handprints. All of the kids' handprints were assembled into a "Christmas tree" on the classroom wall. I think the smaller set of prints are from last year? They are noticeably smaller.

That's it for today! Here's hoping to a good week. Jim is going out of town later in the week and I think we're all pretty much recovered. We just need to get James back on track and then it will be a great week :) Oh and we need to get him sleeping through the night. Those three, four, FIVE wake-ups at all hours are not good for our beauty sleep!