Mary's Birthday

I can't believe it, but my girl turned 8 on Friday! She's still a tad on the young side I suppose. Most of the kids that will be in her 3rd grade class turned 8 last year during 2nd grade.

We didn't have a huge party. We just let her invite her best friend from school, Katelyn, over to spend the night. Doug's mom came into town for her birthday as well. We went and grabbed some pizza from Cici's (3 mediums for $9.99) and took them to one of the city swimming pools. The pool is a pretty good pool. They have a regular swimming pool with lanes to swim laps and a couple diving boards. Then they have more of a kid pool that's only about 3 feet deep. It even has a huge water slide that goes into it. Mary and Katelyn had a blast doing that. Alex didn't want any part of the slide. He's never been quite as comfortable in the water as Mary has been. They also have a little playground kind of area with water spraying out everywhere. There was a little slide there too so Adam spent most of his time there. The lifeguards kept yelling at the boys to stop running. Adam of course didn't listen. He'd just get so excited to go down the slide again that he'd take off running. (Kids only go slow when their parents are in a hurry anyway.)

After we swam for a while we came home and had cupcakes. Mary and I found an easy recipe on Kraft's website for these flowery cupcakes.

Basically you just take a large marshmallow and cut it horizontally into 5 slices (or 4 if you're lazy) and them arrange them in a flower shape with a mini marshmallow in the middle. Then you sprinkle them with colored sugar sprinkles. They were so easy. We used the new pink strawberry marshmallows because they're a teeny bit prettier, but I think white ones would look nice too especially with the sugar sprinkles to give them some color. My kitchen shears did get rather sticky, but they wash off so it's no big deal. Katelyn came over right as I was getting ready to frost and decorate and the girls were excited to play with Mary's new present so I ended up doing them all myself, but they're totally easy enough for kids to do.

Anyway, we had a great time and Mary didn't even get totally exhausted and grouchy like she did at the previous sleepover.