One Special Day

What's better than having your tenth birthday?  Give up?  I'll tell you.  Having your tenth birthday fall on General Conference AND Easter! Can you imagine the magnitude of celebrating?!?!?  Well, that's exactly what happened for cute little Nicki Rae!

This cute girl woke up before the sun!  She showered and got all ready for the day before I could even see straight.  

The kids marveled over their Easter baskets for a while. Then, we read our scriptures (I love reading the story of Christ's resurrection on Easter morning!) .  Afterward, Nicole opened her birthday presents.  As you can see, all three boys helped.  

The most exciting gifts (for me) were a ripstik - which is kind of like a skate board, only WAY harder! and a book that I made specially for her.  She's reading it in this picture.
  

For breakfast, Nicole chose to eat pancakes.  Of course, we also had a lot of colored Easter Eggs to eat.   Then, we went to the basement and watched General conference together.  We still did our traditional "Candy Conference" but we toned it down a bit since they all had Easter baskets full of candy.  Most of the items in the bowls were crackers/nuts.  The conference was wonderful and I even got to cuddle with Bronson for about 45 minutes of it.  

Between conference sessions, we had the dinner that Nicki WOULD have chosen if she didn't have to share her birthday with a holiday.  David grilled the most delicious hamburgers, and we ate Cheetos and raspberries.  Yum!  It would have been even better if we weren't already stuffed.  

We watched the second session of conference upstairs so that I could fiddle around in the kitchen.  When it was over, we put together the last minute preparations, then we invited the family over for our Easter/Birthday party.   In attendance were:

The birthday girl

Alison Marie

Bronny Boy

Joshua James

Grandpa and Grandma Smith

Megan - this was a huge surprise!  We were so happy that she came!  

Kristin and Brian (somehow, Payton was able to avoid the photo shoot!)

McKenna Dear

Grandpa Holt (Brian's dad).

and Katie and Scott.

With David's ingenious ideas, we were able to fit two tables in the kitchen.  Almost all of us fit in there. We had two different kinds of ham (spiral sliced and shredded with mustard) and three different kinds of rolls to make ham sandwiches with, potato salad, a green garden salad, Thai quinoa salad, fruit salad, deviled eggs, chips, pickles and olives (Nicki LOVES pickles) and an ice chest filled with cans of soda pop (also Nicki's idea).  

I made a ridiculous amount of food.  WAY too much!  Plus, no body was hungry in the first place because of the Easter candy, etc.  We sent food home with everyone we could, and we still ate ham for four or five days afterwards.  I'm all hammed out!

This picture cannot really capture the grossness of this boy.  He was covered in multi-colored goo.  Nobody dared get too close for fear that he would touch them.  After a while, he started splashing blue slime all over the floor, so I had to hose him down and get him out.   

Instead of a cake (which Nicki doesn't love) we made several different cookie bars.  Her favorite are "Chess Bars", but we also had caramel brownies, lemon bars, and blue-frosted sugar cookie bars.  David was a little slow with the camera, so we're reenacting the candle blowing out ceremony in this photo.

After dinner, Nicki opened presents from her grandparents and cousins.  

She had such a great day and got so many cool things!  It was wonderful to spend it with family.

Through the dirty window, you can see Payton playing with my boys in the back yard.  He was so patient, fun, and responsible with them!  What a great older cousin!

It was a fun, loud, rowdy night.  My mom explained it to her neighbors like this the following day:  "The only thing we were missing was someone being shot out of a cannon."  Ha ha - I should have thought about renting a cannon!  I'm used to chaos, so it wasn't that far from normal to me, but I'm sure it was quite a change of pace for all of our guests.  From Bronson stealing  Grandpa Holt's cane, riding it like a horse, then wielding it like a weapon to Josh needing an emergency shower right in the middle of the party (involving poop - don't ask), we really put on quite a show.  Later, after everyone had left, David asked, "Now, why was Bronson stripping in front of everyone?"  and I was like, "Oh my heck!  I forgot he even DID that!  It just got lost in the shuffle of all the other crazy things he did."  I'm just going to chalk it up to the sugar high and the excitement of having people to show off for.  One thing's for sure:  Nicole's 10th birthday was definitely memorable!