She ended up throwing the booster on the ground about twenty times, each time hoping to break the booster, but let’s face it. The things are designed to withstand a car crash. There’s not much an eight-year-old can do to it in terms of breakage. She did manage to break one of the arms and was pleased about that. It has been a busy day full of festivities so there was time to run over the booster with the car, but she has one more that we can destroy another day. She did, however, do a happy dance after she dropped slightly dented booster in the trash.
To move on to actual birthday news, she took a treat to school to share with her class (white fudge Ding Dongs-she had one after a soccer game last month and loved it). There was a pencil and a small treat from the office, her teacher let her choose something out of their classroom treasure box, and she came home with a gift from one of her friends that was invited to her upcoming birthday party but who will be unable to attend. She came home to discover her birthday balloons, one of which was almost as tall as she is! And although it had nothing to do with her birthday, Malia loves activity days so she was happy to have an activity fall on her birthday.
Around here the birthday child always gets to choose what we eat for dinner, so Malia choose spaghetti (no surprise there) with NO MUSHROOMS. We always add mushrooms because 5/6 of us love them, but since it was her birthday, I left them out. She also wrote a note and stuck it to the fridge to make sure I remembered to give her the “You Are Special Today” plate at dinner time.
After dinner, Kevin’s parents arrived to join us for the remainder of the day’s celebration. They had a variety of small presents for Malia, things that Kev’s mom had discovered as they cleaned out her mother’s house after she passed away a few months ago. There were things like some shells from the middle east, some chopsticks purchased in Okinawa, and several tiny wind up mouse toys. As Malia took each item out of the box, my mother-in-law explained about each item. Malia was mesmerized with the whole thing.
Other presents included Lego with a horse and rider theme from Daniel, Nathan, Kevin and I, a series of books about horses, and a horse and rider toy based on an animated Netflix series that Malia binge watches. As I’m sure you can tell, she is all about the horses right now. 😊
We sang and had a simple vanilla cake with whipped cream and fresh berries. There are fancier cakes planned for later this week, but for today’s celebration, we kept it simple.
I’m very grateful Malia is in our family. Having a girl join my crew definitely changed the dynamics of our household. She is funny and witty. She is confident and clever. She is opinionated and stubborn. She is all girl, but she is tough as well. Having three older brothers has helped shape her, even though none of them understand her current fascination with horses. I just tell them it’s a girl thing. 😉
