9th Birthday Fun

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Boy oh boy, how quickly does another birthday come around. It only seems like a few months ago that we were organising her 8th birthday/baptism. At the end of May we celebrated Ailish's 9th birthday.

Another year older and taller. It would seem that she's had a growth spurt of late as all her jeans and pants seem to only reach to the top of her ankle. There's about an inch and a half of flesh between her shoes and her jeans. This girl is costing me a fortune!

Each year since she turned 4 we've had a birthday party. Early on this year I decided I didn't want to go through with all the organisation of a party and cost and cancelled any type of birthday party. When I advised Ailish of this a couple of months ago her response was...."but I've already organised and invited some girls"....to which I responded..."the answer is still NO!"

So in an effort to keep it low key and low cost we decided to take the kids bowling, invited just family, and decided on getting her a new bike.

Initially when we decided on a bike (the decision was made on the Friday morning before her birthday - nothing like forward planning hey!) I thought a bike might cost about $200, which I thought was very reasonable. How wrong I was. As I madly searched for the best deal in every bike store within about a 40km radius I discovered that my pricing was a little bit out. So with a spiel worked out about how long the bike will last her and what great features it had I called Ewan and broke the news about the price - to which he was pretty calm about.

It was totally worth the expense of seeing her face light up when we mentioned that her present was outside - a bike was on top of her wish list.

She also received a few cards which contained some birthday money in them. She has been pretty excited about thinking of all the things she could buy. I've tried to reign in her ideas a little as I really didn't feel that buying $20 worth of bubble gum was really the best way to spend the money. I'll take her on a supervised shopping trip in the next couple of weeks.

Not only did money come in the mail but she discovered $10 on the pavement after her netball win - talk about lucky.

Bowling was a hoot. The kids have been previously with Ingrid and Dee but we had not been as a family before. The kids LOVED sliding around in their bowling shoes and watching to see how many pins their ball would topple over. The competition was fierce, especially between Olivia and Ewan (remember Olivia is 3 and Ewan, well he's a bit older) but Ewan left with his dignity in tact having finished only just in front of Olivia by a few points.

The cake Ailish chose this year, in case you can't tell in the picture, was a ladybug. She was pretty easy to make but cleaning up red and black icing smeared around by 7 kids - well that was a little trickier.

All in all she had a great weekend.

What's scary is that she'll be double digits next year which means closer to be a teenager and all that angst that goes with it. I think we'll just enjoy her being 9.

A couple of days later it was my turn to have everyone sing happy birthday to me.