Lauren Turns 8!

Lauren turned 8 years old on the 25th! She was SO excited and had been counting down the days for almost a month. I, on the other hand, could only think repeatedly about how my first baby is already halfway to 16!!!! Ugh.....so depressing! Anyway, we tried to make it a super-fun day.
She opened her gifts when Chris came home for lunch. Her favorite was a complete set of the "Liberty Letters". For any other Moms of 8 year olds out there, I highly recommend these books...they are SO interesting. They are somewhat like American Girl books, but they are Christian as well....just lovely! (published by Zonderkids)
After Chris got home, we gave her the big gift....a new bike! She was SO thrilled!

We spent the evening in West Chester. First, we stopped by to play minigolf. It was really fun...but it's amazing how long it can take a family of 5 to get through the course. It seemed like we were there a LONG time and Chris informed me we had just passed halfway! And he wasn't even playing. He made it his job to follow Caleb and help him get through the course. It was really fun and yes, we managed to hit a few balls in the stream running through the course!!

My little "Tiger" :)

A neat little car we saw parked by Cicis.

We had supper at Cici's pizza....Lauren's choice. And then headed home for cake. I didn't spend a lot of time on this cake since her party was still yet to come.

Thursday, we had Lauren's party. I invited the girls to dress up since it was to be a tea party. I even managed to stay up till almost 2 AM making dress up clothes so Lauren would have something new to wear. In about 2 hours, I had made 4 skirts and a blouse and a shawl....none of which I had a pattern for. You talk about FUN!!!!I felt like I had every bit as much fun as the girls. I, of course, got to serve the tea (I mean fruit punch)and pretended to be "Miss Manderly" I thought later it would have been really fun for the girls if I would have had the time to make a dress like Miss Manderly's as well. They drank out ot the little glass cups that came with the punch bowl. They talked and giggled....it was so cute. Instead of cake, I purchased decorated cookies and brownies from the BonBonerie in O'Bryanville. Their decorated cookies are truly a work of art.

Her guests were: Caroline, Karissa, Brittany and Letha.

After having tea, we played some games. I turned on some fun music and they had a dance. (Oooops...as I learned in Elem. Music Ed., it's called "creative movement") We ended the party by decorating flipflops for the girls to take home. I can't believe I forgot to take pictures of that.

Here's a close-up of the cookies. I got the two lions for the boys of course. Since it was a "girls only" party, I had Katrin come watch the boys for the afternoon and they had a wonderful water balloon fight. But they still got the cookies and punch