A.J.'s 5th Birthday (at last!!!!!)

Last week, on the very last day of November, my sweet middle child FINALLY turned 5.

Poor A.J.  She's stuck as the middle child.  Her birthday falls during the most craziest time of the year right after Thanksgiving and shortly before Christmas AND, to make matters worse, on top of ALL of that, hers is the last birthday of the year in our family.  

Poor, poor little child.

Of course, she does also tend to make it more difficult for herself by being the youngest one on her dance team.  The other "Minis" range in ages from 6 to 10.  Up until this week, A.J. was still 4.  Oh the horror.  To be the littlest, youngest one.  It was like, the most unfair thing of ever.

Unless of course somebody was ignoring her bad behavior or poor dance technique because she was just so "little" and "cute."

We refuse to let her rest on cute.  We're trying to teach her to rely on her smarts.  The cuteness can be for the bonus.  Common sense (logic) and talent might be nice too, but, we're still not sure whether she actually got any of those.  :)

Anyway, so it was her birthday.  Thankfully (for her) she didn't have to go to school because it was still the Thanksgiving break from school.  (I think they give that extra day for the older, boarding school kids to travel back so that they can avoid the craziness of travel that Sunday after Thanksgiving.)  In our case, it meant we could enjoy A.J.'s birthday with her at home for the day, before she had to go to dance in the afternoon for several hours.  Matt had to teach in the morning, but her came home at lunch for the cake and presents part of the day.  

In any case, when I made my way downstairs in the morning A.J. was bouncing around looking at the decorations happily.  Lucy was thrilled to see presents, which I am fairly certain she hoped were for her.  Peter was finishing up drawing Hello Kitty on a piece of paper and making it into a birthday card for his sister.  Then he presented the card to her and gave her a tremendous birthday hug.  Lucy jumped in too.

A.J. was eager to show me the bicycle and pile of presents in the living room, as if I might not have known they were there.

Her Gramma sent the bike, and her Dad had put it together the night before.  

Before long it was coming up on 8:15 in the morning which is her birth time.  She was official 5.  

The morning passed fairly quickly with the kids watching TV and playing together and then soon enough Matt was home for lunch and we could do the official birthday celebration stuff.

A.J. with her cake.

Just in case you didn't know, she'll show you how old she is.  (A whole hand even!)

I have no idea....

Lucy is cute, even when she isn't really eating.

 When it seemed like everybody had eaten as much lunch as they were ever going to, Matt lit the candle.

SO serious, as we sang to her.

Blowing out the candle.  I wonder if she made a wish?  I'm sure we didn't tell her too....
(No worries, too much pressure anyway!)

Then Matt cut the cake.  Strawberry cake.  (Not my favorite, but Matt loves it and A.J. liked that it was pink.  Have I mentioned that birthday cakes, in my opinion, should really always be chocolate?)

A.J. got the first peice

She scraped nearly all the icing off for her first bite.  This first bite (of basically pure sugar)
wound up being almost all she ate of her cake that afternoon.  Hahah.

When everybody had started going into sugar shock, we moved to the living room so she could open he presents.

This was right around the point where Lucy figured out the presents weren't for her....

Hello Kitty Ear Rings.  :)

An electronic pet bird.  She's obsessed with toy pets. Matt and I often wonder why
 since she actually does have a pet fish, a pet snail (that is really just
supposed to clean up after the fish) and two pet doggies.  Anyway, the bird seemed like a
good choice since we don't have one of those in real life.

Shopkins.  I have no idea what the draw is with these little collectible figures, but she loves them.  

Once Lucy saw all the new toys she got excited.  No doubt she figured she could play with everything,
even if none of it was actually hers.

Matt also charged her with delivering the gifts to her sister.  She liked that.

I know I post entirely too many pictures, but I just love all the different facial expressions they make.

Delivering another one.

What is it?  

Reading a card .

So that was fun.  Matt had to go back to work for a few more hours and the kids and I were left home to play with all the new toys for a few hours.

At 3:30 she had to go to dance.  Mondays are her long dance day as she goes from her jazz class to her ballet class and then to her Mini Team rehearsal.  I brought little cupcakes to share with her team mates at the end of class and a few of the older girls gave her cards they had made.

The next day, she went back to school, but she got to celebrate there as well. She read the birthday book to her class and build the rainbow cake on the board.

Then she got to sit in the teacher's chair while everybody sang to her.

Lucy took her sisters spot and pretended she was a regular part of the class.

 Finally, since they were going to have snack next, A.J. led the class in a prayer.

So sweet.

Once everybody had washed hands they enjoyed brownies (which A.J. had brought) and milk.  Several of the kids were sad there weren't cupcakes, but I explained that A.J. likes brownies and we'd had a lot of cake the day before.

After school and lunch that afternoon, we took her outside to tryout her new bike.  She was a bit scared.  Unlike Peter at age 5 (who'd been riding stuff since he was 3,) she really had only taken a small interest in riding trikes and balance bikes over the previous summer.  So peddling is still a little tough for her and she doesn't quite have the balance thing down yet.

There's a small slope to our street, so she needed help getting going.

After a few short laps around the circle of our cul de sac, she tried o turn to sharply and the inevitable happened:

She fell over.  (Even with training wheels!)  

 Matt helped her up and to encourage her to get going again he showed her how easy it is.

(Note to self: set these pictures aside for his retirement in a couple years.  Haha.)

I was proud of her though.  After a moment, and a few giggles at Daddy she was up and trying again.
She doesn't have a ton of time to practice right now, with school and dance and it getting dark so early right now, but she'll get the hang of it in no time I'm sure.

Then finally, to wrap up the birthday celebrations, at the weekly assembly that Friday, she got to get called up front with all the other birthday kids.

There were a lot of them because there were two weeks worth.  Also, I feel like a LOT of babies are born around Thanksgiving for some reason.  

Also, notice that little blond boy to the right of the picture with his hand up?

 Each week, after she announces the students birthdays, she asks the children who else they know that celebrated a special occassion.  Peter is forever raising his hand and wanting to say it's somebody's birthday (even when it wasn't.)  Knowing this, I reminded him before hand that Matt and I had celebrated our 13th Anniversary on Thanksgiving and if he wanted to, he could share that.

He did.

And so he did.  And then after that I don't have any more pictures because I had to go up front with him to have my anniversary recognized.  Super.  

Lucy was excited to go though.  So was Peter.

Now we have 7 more months until another birthday around here.  (Yeah!)  Why do I feel like it won't be long until Peter starts to complain how unfair it is that he STILL has to be 6.....