Party Animals!

I'm pretty sure Daniel's birthday celebration has been going on for about 2 weeks now! When Grandma and Grandpa Ketchum were in town, we had them over for a pre-birthday dinner complete with presents!

The happy little fellow loves legos and enjoys legos that have people/story lines. With two new sets of Harry Potter legos, Daniel was in heaven!

Later on that week, taking advantage of the decreasing humidity, we met some friends at the park for bike rides and a picnic dinner.

Notice that we are a family of 5, but we travel with only 2 bikes. Megan has been afraid to ride her bike, and Daniel has a strong dislike for his bike. He just doesn't like to get on it at all. It's hilarious - he'll just stand beside it and have a stare-down with whoever it is that suggested riding bikes.
Seriously, how can you get frustrated at this sweet face? He'll ride his bike someday, right?

Joshua was pretty excited to get out on the trail to ride with his friend Adam and the dads.

And they're off! Joshua tells me he had a blast. While the rest of us played at the playground.

Megan and Daniel climbing on the playground.

Each family packed their own picnic dinners. I had help from my little minions picking out what they wanted to pack. They did great, even remembering to pack plates and napkins.

We left the park right around sundown and went to the Isidro's house with the Bergherms and Deiningers for some yummy smores.

Catching up to this week....I helped in Daniel's Sabbath School class, and had the wonderful privilege of being present while Mrs. Deanna sang happy birthday to Daniel. It was raining cats and dogs (Joshua is studying idioms in school and so we are now inserting them into conversations as frequently as possible - makes for some great silly conversations!). After church this weekend, we napped then went over to the Deiningers house for a celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving. The food was the same as "our" Thanksgiving, but there was a lot of red-wearing. :) The food was amazing and the kids were all well-behaved and our hostess really outdid herself with crafts and awesome organization. I was so stuffed, I couldn't even think about eating breakfast at 5am on Sunday morning when I got up for work. I had to split this past weekend, to be off all of next weekend for our Adventurers camp-out.

I worked all day Sunday while Keith, the kids and Grandma and Grandpa Holloway went in search of something fun to do indoors, since it was still raining outside. (Pictures to come soon, I think they are on Keith's phone.)

That brings us to the big day today...Daniel officially uses two hands to count his years. Our baby has turned 6 years old.

The boys playing their DS games, while Megan played on Spelling City on the computer. This bought me about 30 minutes to get things organized for dinner tonight.

Well, I thought I had everyone occupied and out of the kitchen, until the biggest kid of all came in to try to eat some of the homemade cream cheese buttercream frosting for the pumpkin chocolate muffins I made today.

Those sweet, sweet dimples. Daniel's teacher gave him this hat to wear today and made a huge deal of it being his birthday.

I still can't believe he's SIX years old! Wow. He's growing into such an amazing young man.

As the night wound down and Grandma and Grandpa Holloway got ready to go home, Joshua and I zipped up to the bookstore to get a Biography for his October book report for school. He is now reading a book about Einstein.