Birthday Numero Dos, Or Should I Say Cinco?

A few weeks after Asher turned one, Eden turned five.

Five.

Just let that sink in for awhile.  Or is that not as startling of a fact to everyone else as it is to me?  I cannot get over five.  Five!

Anyway.  Birthdays are out of control now.  Seriously, as a child I had one birthday party that I can remember.  Three girls came.  (It was the end of summer and still a few weeks before school started.  Also, we lived in the boonies.  I wasn't that unpopular!)  We played a couple relay races and ate some cake.  The end.  (Also, it was August and Southern Illinois and 100,000 degrees.  My mom blew up a bunch of balloons the night before, but we lived in an old farm house without air conditioning.  All the balloons popped overnight due to the heat.  Not a single balloon made it to the morning.)

Now birthday parties are insane.  They all have themes and major attractions and gift bags to thank guests for coming.  Gift bags!  To give to the person who just came to your party and gave you a gift!  Just wait, next it will be required to write a thank you card for your gift bag.  Or maybe it is already required and we are just a really rude family.  Anyway, Eden has probably been invited to a minimum of 7 birthday parties in the first two months of school.  Many have involved bounce houses.  One was at an airport!  The next one coming up involves a hayride, corn maze, and pumpkin patch (with a free pumpkin, of course).  I'm confident that the parents are spending hundreds of dollars on these parties.  And who doesn't want to throw a super fun party for their kid?

Well, I don't, I guess.  I mean I really want Eden (and Asher) to have great memories of being celebrated on their birthday.  I just don't think that super-expensive parties are the right way to accomplish that (although I also understand that expensive is a relative term).  Anyway, Peter and I talked about it and decided our kids could have "big" parties for milestone birthdays: 1, 5, 10, (and then I can't decide: 13, 16, 18?  Is that too many?  Just 16?  But becoming a teenager and becoming an adult seem like big milestones too.  Then again, I am NOT handing out gift bags to a bunch of 16-year-olds, so maybe this is all moot anyway.)  Birthdays that do not fall into the milestone category will just be small family birthdays.  Dinner of your choice, cake, presents, probably a fun activity to do together as a family, but that's it.  Maybe they could invite a friend or two over to participate in the family celebration as they get older.  And really, that's what both Eden and Asher's first birthday parties were like too.  But we agreed that Eden's fifth birthday party could be as much of a big deal as we could make it.

We reserved a park and served lunch, along with cake and ice cream, of course.  Eden invited friends from church, tumbling, and school, as well as family and neighbors.  There was a theme, decorations (balloons!), and even gift bags.  There were no bounce houses or anything of that nature, but I still think she had a great time and felt very celebrated.  While I'm looking forward to some simpler/quieter celebrations next year, I enjoyed throwing this party for my big girl too.

Sadly, I have a whopping four photos of the party currently downloaded to my computer.  The rest were taken by my wonderful sister-in-law and are floating around my house somewhere on a cd.  So for now, this is all I have:

I will try to find and upload some more at a later date if possible.  Eden's actual birthday fell in the middle of the week and we celebrated the day itself by going to the zoo (one of her favorite places in the world) AND taking her to see her first musical (Mary Poppins) at the Muny with my mom and my oldest brother and his wife.  She even got her face painted like a cheetah while at the zoo - something she has asked to do many times.

I am so very, very blessed to have this little girl in my life.  She brings us so much joy and laughter and wonder.  I can't wait to see what the next year of her life will bring!