I need a bumper sticker that says "I Survived Patrick's 4th Birthday Party". Haha! In all seriousness, it wasn't that bad. The sun could've r.s.v.p.-ed to let me know that it wouldn't be making an appearance, but the kids had fun and nobody went home with a violent stomach virus like at his last birthday party, so that was good.
The party got kicked off with playtime in the backyard. Katie brought the jumpoline, which was a big hit, and then the "hired" entertainment--aka the fire truck--showed up. They kicked things off with a really weak rendition of Happy Birthday to Patrick. Then all the kids got to sit in the cab and one of the men showed us how they put on their turnout gear, which scared the living daylights out of my poor son when he got to the face mask. But he recovered fairly quickly, which was good because at that point the firemen got bored with all the rugrats and faked a call to hightail it outta there!!! Ahh, well, who cares? The kids enjoyed watching them leave.
After that we went inside for lunch, which went without too many disasters, but things started to get a little hairy during present time. I'm not sure what happened, but I got a little overwhelmed and somehow ended up with men's underwear on my head. Check out Trevor's face as he gives fair warning to all the other kids. I snapped back to reality in time to sugar the kids up with birthday cake and the send them back outside.
After the birthday, while Joe and Patrick searched the house (quite successfully) for any spare pieces of sugar to ingest, Katie, Andrea and Mandy stayed on for a little ping-pong round robin tourney. That's when we found out that Katie was freakin' Forrest Gump in another life. Not even Luke could match her mad ping-pong skills. She beat every last one of us to a pulp, and I daresay she enjoyed doing it...
This morning, on Patrick's real birthday, we went to the Palladium to eat lunch after church. We had saved a few more presents for him to open today, so he tore right into them as soon as we sat down. Luke and I gave him a rescue helicopter to finish out his extensive emergency vehicle collection. Now all we have to do is build the addition to the house to store them all. His most coveted present though, was a pack of Big Red. He's been dying for this stuff and we said he could have it when he turned four. You could see the anticipation in his eyes as he unwrapped that first piece, followed by shock as he promptly spit it out, screaming "HOT!" and diving for his juice. Well, I'm glad we got that out of our system.
