Archie's 7th Birthday

I was really struggling with how to celebrate Archie’s birthday this year. In Mobile, he has a ton of friends and family. But here in Cincinnati…well…not so many. In February, we’ll have been here 2 years. I can hardly believe it! Even though we’ve put in two years’ time here, we still are a little low in the friend department. You know…people you meet and just mesh with. Recently, Archie and I have met some Moms and kids in circus class we are both feeling pretty good about. I dunno why I have such a difficult time with that. I have to remind myself that it took me over a year to develop the relationships in my home school group in Mobile. And I still miss them so much! I’m just retarded in the making friends area, I guess. Mom says I’m just very selective. I think she was trying to make me feel better!! :-) I’ve never been very outgoing.

Anyhoo…the problem was that Archie wanted to celebrate his birthday with a slew of kids and we didn’t know a group of kids (or parents) well enough that might want to come over, with the exception of our next-door neighbour. I know Archie wanted to go to Mobile, but we decided on a Thanksgiving visit since it would be a more efficient use of Phillip’s vacation days. So after much thought, I finally came up with doing something at the rec center down the street, where Archie goes for snack time and soccer during the after school program. All the kids are very nice to him and the staff is very welcoming to his participation in playing and games, even though he’s not ‘officially’ part of the after school program. We know lots of those kids pretty well, but I didn’t think their parents would take them to our house for a birthday party since the parents don’t know anything about us.

So I checked with the staff, and they were cool with me bringing cake and Kool-Aid down there for the kids to sing happy birthday and enjoy cake with us. It worked out beautifully! Archie was totally surprised! Morgan made him a very cool Spiderman cake! She seemed proud of it, with good reason! It was awesome! Here is the finished product:

Here he is blowing out the candles. At my birthday, they pulled the old relighting candles trick. We were informed that it would be acceptable at his birthday too. “If we want to” of course! So we did. He finally got them all out.

In all, there were about twenty kids to eat cake with him and sing Happy Birthday. It was deafening! After cake and playing a while longer, we went home to open gifts! Just before entering the house, Morgan pelted him with silly string. He loved it!

He got a frog bath set, some bike accessories (a lock and a bell), Season one and two of The Batman cartoon series, and a Wii game called Outdoor Adventure. He wanted a lock so no one would steal his bike. Of course, for the jerk-faces who try to steal it while he is riding it, it won’t do any good. But he has a Monster Mama for those occasions!

After we opened presents, I announced that lo and behold…I forgot to cook dinner! Whatever should we do? A birthday with no dinner??? For shame!!! Funny thing was, he said we could eat frozen pizza. He let me off the hook! I can’t believe it! Well, since we only had ONE frozen pizza to be divided among the four of us, we decided it would be a good idea to ‘ride out for a bit’.

We had originally planned on a Chuckie Cheese outing. Which would be a special thing for him, because Phillip and I HATE Chuckie Cheese. So he’s been there maybe twice in his whole life. But fortunately, Phillip came up with a better idea…the indoor amusement park on the top floor of Tri-County Mall! Since it was a Wednesday night we were the ONLY people there! We had a ride operator at our disposal, following us around turning on the rides for us. They had a go-kart track, bumper cars, some spinny-around rides, rock climbing wall, swings, putt-putt, a climbing thing for kids, etc. Here are some photos:

Here is a short video of him blowing out his relighting candles:

And here is a short snippet showing those of us who were not wearing an infant riding the bumper cars!

Much thanks to Mom, Dad, Pat, Linda, Regular E, Old E and Julie for the birthday calls! He really enjoyed getting all those messages!