Wishes Do Come True

Day 15 - Emily's birthday was actually on Thursday but our life is busy (temple trip the night of her birthday, Jared working every weeknight evening, etc) so we didn't celebrate fully until Saturday and even then the celebration spilled over into Sunday. I felt bad that Emily had to wait to enjoy her birthday celebration but in a way it extended the fun of her special day and made it last four days instead of just one - the Kennedy's call that a birthday season!


After Emily and Madison went to bed the night before Emily's actual birthday I spent a few minutes doing this to her door. I had to wait a little while to make sure they were asleep because blowing up balloons and taping streamers to a door frame aren't the most quiet nighttime activities. I'm lazy and like to sleep on the days I'm not driving to seminary so I wasn't awake in the morning when she opened the door, but I know she thought it was pretty cool. Those two sweet girls weren't sure what to do with the streamers after the balloons fell into their room and they didn't want to break them so they kept ducking down and squeezing underneath when they needed to go in or out of their room!

Saturday was the day - Emily's day! We didn't have any concrete the plans so we just had Emily take the lead and tell us how she wanted to celebrate. We started by sleeping in and then Emily and I went out shopping for a birthday cake. She wanted cheesecake for her birthday - specifically chocolate swirled cheesecake that looked special. I can make cheesecake but I never really make them look fancy so I knew we'd need to buy something. The first store we tried was kind of a bust - the only cheesecakes they had were plain vanilla or chocolate. However, there's more than one store around here (we're still kind of getting used to that!) so we just drove down the road a little to look at the next place and we hit the cake jackpot. I usually like to make birthday cakes for the girls, but everything at the bakery at this place looked amazing. Sometimes bakery cakes look great but don't really taste that spectacular, however, you could tell just by looking at these cakes that they were more than just looks. In the end she decided on the chocolate cheesecake variety cake which had six different flavors. Why pick one when you can have six instead? We also brought home a huge helium balloon shaped like Sully from Monsters, Inc. It wasn't part of the plan at all but Emily saw the balloons and mentioned how it would make her childhood complete if she could get a helium balloon. Apparently she'd never gotten one before and had always dreamed of having one. I am happy to grant wishes or make dreams come true when it's as simple as buying a character helium balloon.

After a quick lunch we opened presents.  Emily always makes such funny faces when it's present time but I'm a nice mom (no matter what she might think) so I've only posted the prettiest ones here for everyone to see.

Present time is the most fun part of birthdays, right?
Notebooks and pens from her two littlest sisters
Cute sisters
Flake bars from Abby, yum!
A beanbag - another long-time wish fulfilled!
For the rest of the afternoon Emily's plan was to hang out and have fun as a family, but I think it ended up being sort of boring after a little while so she suggested that maybe we could go shopping.  Even though we're back in the land of plenty and there are two grocery stores (what?!) near our house, we still have to drive at least thirty minutes to do any sort of shopping that's not for groceries.  So we all loaded into the car and headed to the closest mall which is about thirty minutes away. Once we got there we all sort of followed Emily around as she browsed through every store that looked interesting.  

The most exciting store for Emily was Build a Bear Workshop where she confessed to another childhood dream - making a bear at Build a Bear. It was another easy wish to fulfill and after about twenty minutes she had her new bear, Chester, in her arms.

Sully and Chester, Emily's two new best friends
We ended our shopping trip and drove to Texas Roadhouse for dinner. When we lived in Wyoming it was our family tradition to celebrate every birthday with a Texas Roadhouse dinner so we were happy to learn that we had one near our new home. By the time we were finished with dinner and came back home it was after 10 pm, so we put off the cheesecake birthday cake and blowing out candles until Sunday morning before we left for church.  



We love our amazing Emily and had so much fun celebrating her fifteenth birthday! 

Comments

  1. LarisaNovember 18, 2014 at 5:31 AM

    Hurray for birthday SEASON! It always makes the birthday better ;-) Happy birthday, Emily!

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownNovember 18, 2014 at 5:53 AM

    Happy
    Birthday season! You look beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
  3. GrandmomNovember 18, 2014 at 4:49 PM

    So glad you had a wonderful Birthday Season, Happy Happy Emily! Love ya tons Grandmom

    ReplyDelete

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