Frosty Fun!

Can't get too much further in the month without recapping Ellen's Fifth Birthday Party!

Oh, but first, the night before ... a little Shepard girl in the school Christmas show! (she may or may not have picked her nose on stage)

We had a nice little party last year for Ellen and a few friends and we decorated cookies. We also usually have a little family party. Ellen has asked - all year long - for a party with all her friends. She gets invited to birthday parties all the time and it seems the Pre-K drill is to invite everyone to every party, which is lovely, yet also sets up big expectations. I just finally decided we would bite the bullet and do it because I knew she would love it and it would be the last big party for quite awhile (or, maybe forever).

We told her that her present would be her party and she was all about it. It took some thinking to find a place that was close, big enough and reasonably priced and we ended up at Foo's Frozen Custard, which is really close to their school. We were able to reserve the back room on a Saturday afternoon and I just planned for the kids to eat ice cream and do some crafts and be done. And then - as the RSVPs rolled in - I thought Ellen was really lucky to have so many sweet friends, and I started to panic about how I was going to keep 24 four and five-year-olds busy for 1.5 hours.

These are the best of the pictures because, 1. There was terrible lighting in the room and 2. Betsy (our photographer) was forced into "teacher mode" to help me wrangle children (along with my teacher friend Marie and all the other adults). Ellen's friends were really well-behaved, but man, I could never be a teacher OR have more than two children. We ended up making a snowman craft, playing pin-the-nose-on-the-snowman, coloring lots of snowman pages, running around a little, eating ice cream, playing tic tac toe, crying a bit here and there, and smiling that we made it to 4:30 without losing any children. Hooray!

I made a decision that we wouldn't open presents at the party because I knew it would turn into a free-for-all and we had to leave right at 4:30 to get to another party. (Yes! Over committed!) Ellen's friends do mostly open presents at their parties, but I polled my out-of-town friends and they said they never do, so I felt justified. We wrapped up the birthday party, headed to the Santa party (pictures to come!), then back home to open presents. It was actually really great - Ellen got to enjoy opening her presents, it was nice and orderly (my gift, I suppose) and she got some really nice things - lucky, lucky girl.

Crazy present-eyes!

We almost started opening presents and then I realized we didn't get a picture with the birthday girl! Thanks, camera timer!