Birthday Girl-Choices

Warning: Tons of birthday pictures and too much birthday information, listed below, for most of you. It's okay if you walk away now. Remember, we have two kids away from us on two different continents who missed being with their mom yesterday. The info overload is mainly for them. We won't be offended if you leave now and come back tomorrow.

For those of you who stayed....here we go.

We have a tradition in our family. Whoever has the birthday gets to choose what we do for the whole day. My girlfriend has the only summer birthday so kids are out of school and we have more free time so she literally gets to pick stuff for the whole day. As Anderson reminded her yesterday, "It's your day mom, you get to do whatever you want!"

One of the traditions we have is that the birthday person gets to have a special breakfast. This was picked out by Carys yesterday. Over the years she's had good big sister examples and yesterday she was super excited to do this on her own. On Tuesday we had to make a special trip to the grocery store to get what she needed. I was then instructed to wake her up at 6:30 yesterday morning so she could begin.

About an hour and a half later we were all enjoying her creations. As the kids brought the goodies in they sang happy birthday because Carys put some candles on three of the muffins. Benay got to enjoy breakfast in her BDAY QUEEN hat that Anderson made for her.

Carys made blueberry muffins, they were awesome and we killed them all.

Carys also started this thing.....

.....which turned into this.

Very cool right? Amazing how tangerines, blueberries, kiwis and bananas can turn into a tropical "edible" paradise. We killed this fruit plate as well.

Carys is our party nut. She loves them and she had breakfast planned for about a week.

Anderson then showed her our birthday blog about her.

And then she opened up some presents.

This is always fun but even more so with Giovanni around.

 After all her hard work Carys needed to just chill for a little while.

My girlfriend then chose to just hang out with the kids and play. The big kids played Monopoly.....with loud outbursts of funny accusations of cheating.

The little dudes asked my girlfriend to play with play-doh.

She made this.

As this was going on she began receiving phone calls.

This happened throughout the day. The first came from my parents who have a tradition of calling on every person's birthday to sing happy birthday together. I wouldn't say they are ready for a record contract (sorry guys) but I will say that it's become a tradition and everyone waits for that singing call.

She literally had different people calling her just to wish her a happy birthday. She got to talk to Bronwyn and lots of our Brasilian friends and family. One of our favorite calls was our brother Elinton who called and said, "May God bless you with many more birthdays in your own country.......which is Brasil."

The last call she got was from her parents but they missed us as we were out eating supper.

She then got to talk to Ansley on skype.

Ansley prepared a birthday croissant complete with candles and sang happy birthday.

Throughout the day she also got several emails and notes of facebook wishing her a happy birthday.

She made the kids happy and chose hamburgers for lunch. No picture needed for that.

After lunch she chose to go swimming at a pool just down our street. It's close enough to walk.

She had fun getting to hang out, talk with a new friend and enjoy some "cool down" time with Quigs as it was again in the 90's yesterday.

The kids also got to hang out with their buds that they haven't seen since October.

We all came back, took showers and got ready to go to one of my girlfriends favorite restaurants. A pizzaria.

My girlfriend, her birthdays and pizzarias seem to be a common theme. Here were are a year ago, on her birthday, in São Paulo state (city of Tatuí if you want to look it up) with some of our best friends. You get the picture. My girlfriend LOVES pizzarias.

Anyway, we got there around 7:30. You need to understand that Brasilians eat late. When you go to a restaurant at 7:00 there is usually no one there. Here are a couple of pictures of our place at 8:00.

Here it is at 9:15.

Anyway, at our pizzarias they keep bringing pizza around. All kinds of pizza. You eat until you say stop and bring out the dessert pizza. So we tagged the regular pizza for a while. The cheese was, well, cheesy.

And then made a dent in the dessert pizza. Carys and Anderson wanted to take a couple of "rub it in" pictures just for Ansley who is our family ice cream freak.

We had a great time. Actually, the whole day was great.

We got home close to 10:00. Everyone stripped down (it was 90+ in our house) and got ready for bed.

After the kids got in bed I plopped down on the couch in front of a floor fan trying to stay cool. My girlfriend came over, gave me a little kiss and thanked me for her great day and then she went to bed.

After she went to bed I started thinking about how many people love my girlfriend, how many expressed that today and how cool it is to have family, real family, on two continents. All these people know what our family has always known. She is a special person.