One day a year...

...Emma doesn't anticipate her birthday. May 7th-May 5th is spent anxiously waiting for it, but May 6th, well, that's golden.

I realized a few years ago that of all birthdays that you celebrate with your child, the one on which you actually gave birth is the easiest. What I mean by that is: throwing birthday parties is not my favorite. It doesn't help that 4 of the 5 kids have birthdays in April, May, June, and July. By the time Kevan's birthday rolls around in August I am burned out. I usually just say, "Oh...yeah...how about you go buy yourself a CD and say it's from me?"

So about the time I had this epiphany, I decided that we were going to move the kids to every-other-year birthday parties. The neglected, birthday-party-less child still gets all the same hoopla (treats for their school class, choose the dinner menu, cake of choice, presents and carrying on, etc.), just no party with friends.

This year Emma took chocolate chip cookies and juice boxes in to school, had Daddy-made Norwegian pancakes for dinner, and helped me decorate her chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (and sprinkles).

Behold, the suffering child:
Emma announced several times that she was going to open her presents "like Daddy does." Meaning, rip off all the paper without looking, and only once every shred of wrapping is discarded, look at the present. The only problem with this style of unwrapping is that I have to work harder at making sure the other children don't yell out what the present is before the recipient sees it. So fun!

That's a new Polly Pocket set. She was pretty excited to get it. Of course, our sweet exuberant Emma has that expression on her face about 43% of the day.
This is a scrapbook from Grandma and Grandpa Lewis. My abilities to keep scrapbooks updated is worse than my blogging consistency, so hopefully Emma will have a little more luck with it!
Jake is taking two art classes (yeah, private schools are pretty rad), and he gave Emma this really cool clay box he made and painted:
Megan ran to her room, saying she had a present for Emma, too, and came out with one of her prized possessions. It's a ceramic head of Nefertiti that Meg bought and painted during Egyptian culture week at school. She just loves it. We just loves that she calls it "Neferteeny." But because she loves her big sister so much, she gave it her for her birthday.
This is Emma talking on Skype to Grandma and Grandpa Lewis. I'm wondering how on earth she got so grown-up looking.
She requested cupcakes instead of a cake, and fortunately nine of them fit just perfectly on the plate. You may notice that the one in the middle has significantly more frosting than the others. That's because it was the last one I frosted, and I still had a lot of frosting left in the bag, so I just kept piping more and more on. As soon as Emma realized what I was doing (she was on sprinkles duty), she said, "That one's MINE!" And then when I still wasn't stopping with the frosting she said, "Are you doing that because you know I like frosting?" and I answered, "No, I'm doing it because I know you like A LOT!" (There's a classic family story of the time Kevan's dad asked 2-year old Emma how much she wanted of something he was dishing up, and she said, "TOO MUCH!")
Following the theme of having a lot, Emma attempted (and mostly succeeded! we were most impressed with her skills) to blow out each candle individually. I think she figured that would get her 9 wishes instead of a measly 1. Here she is partway done:
Very pleased with herself:
We sure love our girl A LOT!