Happy Birthday, Micah!

Micah turned 6 on Sunday, and in a rare occurrence, we actually celebrated on his birthday!  Micah picked a gourmet birthday dinner of corn dogs, spiralized sweet potatoes (this recipe is *really* good), and cabbage.

His cake was an interesting story.  After church, a lady came up to the kids in the fellowship time and said that a cupcake cake that had been donated to the food pantry hadn't been taken, and so she gave it to my kids.  Well, it had all these festive balloons around it, so it seemed like a sign that it was a birthday cake!  We took 2 cars, and I was busy visiting with friends when all this happened, so I had no clue until I walked in our front door and saw Micah and the girls piping "Happy Birthday Micah" on the center part.  Such a God-thing!  I had been planning on baking a cake that afternoon, but hey, God provided one instead!

Then it was time to open presents.  Micah had been GREATLY looking forward to this moment for months.  Eleven months and 29 days, really, lol.  He was so excited to see presents appear!

The presents had kind of a "cars" theme.  Aside from the obligatory candy selection (which he had been eagerly awaiting, lol) we got him a little box with twin tracks that attach to the top, providing slides for 2 Matchbox cars, and also a "Cars" early book book of several stories.  Hopefully he'll be able to read them by this summer . . . The big present was a remote control car.  Aunt Rose had gotten the older boys one for Christmas, and Micah *really* loves it.  But they weren't always thrilled with having him drive it around, and he had said several times how much he wished he had one of his very own.  So he was quite excited to open this little one up, and he and Drew have played outside with that as often as they can so far.  Clearly, he had a great birthday haul!

Oh, I almost forgot--I also stuck in with the candy a really cheap Easter-themed pinball game, and a bag of 6 "bouncy balloons" (those sturdy balloons that have rubber bands attached to them and you whap them with your fist really fast).  These were both from the Michael's selection of Easter basket stuffers, lol, but they made great birthday presents--and best of all, none of them will stick around for all that long!  The kids have all had a great time bopping away at the balloons, and while it's been loud and annoying, I haven't popped any of them yet, lol.

But wait!  There was still one more present from Grandma and Grandpa that came today!  We have this board game called "Power" that is a strategy game that only takes about an hour.  My boys love it.  We got it from my aunt and uncle in Utah close to 20 years ago, and it's not sold today that we can find.  The game has 4 colors of little plastic pieces--soldiers, tanks, airplanes, ships, missiles, flags, etc.--and Micah loves to take them all out and set them up and play with them.  This makes the bigger boys crazy, since he is not quick about picking them up when he's done, and Verity and Drew like to pick the pieces up and wander around with them.  So my mom and dad got him this bucket of military stuff, filled with soldiers, planes, ships, tanks, and flags.

He was so thrilled, and he immediately started setting everything up in the playroom!  You can see he had the help of both younger and older brothers!  The pieces are a really good size, bigger than I had imagined, so I think he and Drew (and the others) will have fun with this for a long time.  And it all goes into this nice bucket!

It's okay that we dragged out Micah's birthday celebration a few extra days.  This afternoon we *finally* finished celebrating Anna's birthday (which was technically back on March 28) by going to see "Beauty and the Beast" with 2 friends!  The girls, predictably, really loved it, and I was glad we could make it work to go.  She wins a record for longest celebrated birthday in our family!