Happy Birthday Abby and Judith!

My cute little sisters-in-law, Mr. B's younger sisters, turned 11! Crazy how time goes by that fast. My kids love playing with them and they feel like cousins because they are so close in age. The girls get a little kick out of pulling the "I'm your Aunt" card. Hardly works.

For their birthday, we all went to Joe's Crab shack and they each ate GIANT buckets of crab!

Love these two little ladies to the moon. Booth kids rock.

Happy Birthday Craig!

For my brother in law's birthday, we picked up two dozen cupcakes and headed out to Ontario to have some yummo Vince's (spaghetti in all its deliciousness) and celebrate. Love him so much. We were glad to get to spend time with some of our favorite people!

Happy Birthday Cakestina

My gal Cakestina is having a birthday. Our school is having a fundraiser. We celebrated Cakestina at our school’s dinner night at STACKED. STACKED is so much fun. We love eating there (and it’s super close to our work so being the big fans that we are, we go often). 

You order your completely customizable food from an ipad. It’s good fun and they have an awesome menu of burgers, salads, pizzas, mac and cheese, sausages, shakes, and cookie ice cream sandwiches. YUM! The concierges that take care of your table all work together. At the end of you visit, you can easily split a check, chose if your method of payment and even chose if you want to tip (if you do, and you should people, just saying… you can chose a percentage, flat dollar amount or other). The menu has so many options, gluten free, curry ketchup, pretzel bun, siracha mayo… oh man I could go on for days. Love that place and LOVE my girl Cakestina… if you’d like to know how much, I wrote about that here. We made a reservation for 25, fancied things up with some balloons and all got together to celebrate. It really was a fun night. And of course we had to sing… LOUD. Considering that STACKED has not interior walls separating diners, our lovely voices really carried through the restaurant. Lucky folks.
Happy Birthday Cakestina. Hope you feel loved beyond measure.

Happy Birthday Naima

When we met she was a small fry. A tiny fry. A cutie fry. She was quite the center of Mr. B’s whole world. Only daughter of his only brother, his love for her has be more than fierce from the very beginning. As I came into their lives she became important to me too and I easily fell for her precocious nature and sparkly eyes too. How we love Naima. She’s gotten older and more beautiful and graceful and smart and kind. We feel so lucky to be a part of her life. For her 15^th birthday we wanted to do something special and appropriate for such a young woman. We decided on a year long subscription to Birchbox. It’s a fabulous site that sends a goodie box filled with samples of perfumes, creams, makeup, fashion tid bits and more. It’s a monthly surprise! of the best kind. We couldn’t ask to be Auntie and Uncle to anyone sweeter than she. Happy 15^th Birthday Nai-nai. Love you.

HeaBug turns 4!

The time is going by faster than I'd like it too. But I feel like we are getting to enjoy our children at every age and really savor them.
Our Hea Bug is truly sunshine. The is sass, she is sweetness, she is opinionated and she calls it exactly how it is.
We are so happy to be her family. We couldn't have asked for better icing on our cake. Love you girl bug. To the moon.

HeaBug LOVES going to gymnastics, she had a party at her gym. Lots of friends, lots of fun! And thank goodness for the wonderful Coaches, Ms. Whitney and Ms. Taylor for handling our 18 little ones for two hours! (And the few big ones that jumped in on the fun near the end).

Seriously, they should have gymnastics parties for adults. This would be fun.

Games and exercise and fun. That's what I'm talking about. After hosting JT's birthday with every imaginable sweet, tasty, tummy aching indulgence... We decided to go the opposite for HeaBug's party. We had two giant trays of fruit (Strawberries, Mangos and Pineapple in one and Strawberries, Pineapple, Oranges and Watermelon in the other). We had bionico toppings, crema de leche, granola, coconut and raisins -eh on the raisins. (If you've never had one, I have just the place for you to go.)
Two trays of veggies (Broccoli, carrots, tomatoes and peas) dip, hummus and this amazing herb popcorn from Trader Joes. Seriously, it's the bomb. We had only waters and then the best part was the 108 mini cupcakes from Sweet Embellishments! Tasty, tiny and adorable. They were perfect!

Always a fan of the birthday song, it was extra special that we were singing to her.

On the morning of her actual birthday, she woke up to a decorated hallway and breakfast table! The balloons had qualities that we love about her written on them. Intelligent, Clever, Sweet, Witty... Brother was awesome in helping read them to her.

I picked girfren up from school to a Surprise Car Party. Thank you dollar tree and being 10 minutes early. I popped in there for some balloons, party hats, blow horns and necklaces. Pack all that in our mini cooper and we had a downright shindig goin' on. She was so surprised and just loved it!

Kids get to choose birthday dinner. She picked Sashimi from Tokyo Hibachi. It's our favorite sushi spot. Very traditional and not jazzed up with too many sauces. Mr. B has been going there since he was smaller than HeaBug. He took me for the first time when I was 15 years old! And Yuki still makes the very best spicy tuna salad!
For the kids, we generally go to Fusion Sushi. It's close to the house, they have happy hour specials and  they're cheaper lol. Which matters when they eat sushi like grown folks! But she wanted to go to the Buddah Place. I knew exactly what she meant and we were happy to oblige. They were excited to see her in her crown and with her balloons so Auntie Meg and the ladies were sure to bring her out a candle and some ice cream. They sang to her in English and Japanese and our HeaBug was beaming ear to ear!

We sure are blessed to have this girl in our lives. She makes me laugh out loud, literally, many times a day. She also makes me want to pull my hair out at times, as  a daughter should. We love her more than she'll know and we will embrace each day of her being 4 years old the same way we did when she was three and two and one... With patience, gratitude and adoration.

Post Birthday Lady Date

 My dear friend, Mrs. Mabry and I celebrated our birthdays last month. But we didn't get to party together so we made a date for January. Lunch out at Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen in the Downtown Disney District and a movie.
Parking at Downtown Disney was craziness but we realized it was due to the Disney 1/2 Marathon  being run the next day. So while we had to walk a little farther, we didn't mind so much since parking was free! Nice!
We enjoyed yummy eats complete with candles on a birthday double chocolate soufflé and kid free, girlfriend chatting time.

The plan was to see "This is 40" but we finished our lunch too late to make it in time. We ended up seeing "Silver Linings Playbook" which was awesome by the way.

It was so fun to catch up with her. We spent the better part of our tween through young adult years quite attached and have since gone on to be married mamas now but taking time to get together like this just reminds me how lucky of a girl I am to be her friend. We've been through quite a lot of hand holding, hair holding (lol), shoulder sharing, birthday tears, laughing hysterically at silly things, meeting boyfriends and standing by each other as those boyfriends became our husbands, having babies, buying houses and growing up. Lucky for sure.

Source: imgfave.com via Kryssie on Pinterest

so true right? xo my friend.

Love, Mrs. B

You're killin' me Smalls... JT's 8th birthday at the Sandlot

JT's favorite movie is The Sandlot. For his birthday, we decided to have a Sandlot Party at our house. It's been raining lately. Very wet, very muddy in our giant yard. I was so nervous that I'd have a bunch of kids that I needed to entertain with last minute inside games. Fortunately, the sun was shining on us for the morning and though there was a chill in the air, our pals didn't seem to notice.

We had baseball tees with the kids names on the back. They got to enjoy classic glass bottled cokes.

I was so glad to have awesome helpers. This is the first year that we've done a "drop off" party. Parents don't have to stay and hang out. They can go and enjoy 3 kid free hours! Thankfully, my pal Cakestina and my Mother-in-law stayed and helped with games, food, blowing up balloons and kid wrangling.

We were so glad to see Mr. B's brother Chris and our nephew E. We live in the same city but as things go with busy people, hardly get to spend time together. We were excited to show him our new home and JT was over the moon at having his big cousin over. They had the best time playing around!

We played a game where each kiddo had a balloon and we raced to see who could pop their balloon first.

Then we played a fun game of Blind Man's Bluff. Something I remember playing all the time when war were little.

                                                                               

We played a fun game of steal the bacon. It was hard core and I talked a lot of trash to my opponent (Mr. B)

I failed terribly, ALL THREE TIMES! our fun rivalry was fun for the kids though.

This is my valiant effort

It came time to do the piñata. Each of the kids took turns going from youngest to oldest. Without the blindfold you got three swings. With the blindfold, you got five.

JT took it easy his first at bat so that everyone could get a turn. We told him to go ahead and "let'er buck" and he sure did.

 JT's actual birthday morning, he awoke to special message balloons all over the house and we had funfetti pancakes for breakfast. Even our Elf on the Shelf, Blueberry Angus got in on the celebrating.

 It's been a privilege to be his parents. It's been a pleasure to watch him grow. We are so proud of him every day and so blessed that he is our son. Love you buddy.