Happy Birthday Seth

Big Trip 2... Day 23... July 21, 2007... Saturday

...in which 3 pool-deprived children turn into wrinkly, shivering prunes while causing their mother's toes to split... (but more on this later)

Wake up with a full house (from the sleepover the night before). Manage to get my coffee and post to the blog before the older 3 take over the computer for an hour of fun with Google Earth. They went to the Grand Canyon, Egypt, here, and our house in VA. Plus a lot of other places too. It's one of Thomas' favorite activities and my kids are willing travel-mates.

Elena came around 10:30 and the women-folk headed out to hunt and gather at Costco. I did not find the great green chiles that I found last year but I did get a new flavor of potato chips - Buffalo Bleu. Does anyone think I can get them home without turning them into crumbs or having them self-combust in a hot car? I also had a nice conversation with the sausage sample guy about how VA just doesn't offer such great flavors of Aidell's sausage. He had green chile and habanero as well as roasted red pepper and corn chicken sausages. In a big package no less (the standard 4 sausage package just isn't enough to feed my family of 5 you know!). We finished it off with a mocha freeze from the food counter then headed up to finish up the party preps.

Grandma and Elena did a lot of prepping while I sort of watched the other kids. I even got to hold Seth for about an hour right before the party. The kids asked at least 50 times if it was time to change for swimming yet. Finally, we headed over around 2:30. We got in about 20 minutes of swimming before the thunder arrived (who invited the thunder I want to know!). Spent an hour or so shivering and snacking in the clubhouse and telling the kids every 10 seconds that even though the rain has stopped, that doesn't mean the lightning and thunder won't still kill you. Finally at 4ish we got to go swim again. Grandma and Grandpa showed up with more food so we ate then swam. The girls got cold so I went back home to get dry clothes for them. And when I got back, they wanted to swim some more. So we swam. Then it was time for cake. We ate the super-yummy birthday cake that Elena made then ... can anyone guess what we did next? That's right. We swam. And swam and swam and swam. All the other kids were out of the pool, changed and ready to go and my pool-deprived children were STILL SWIMMING! Which means I was still swimming since I am the official floatie for Felisa. Finally we got everyone and all of the toys out. Finished cleaning the clubhouse. I walked back with 5, passed out snacks, and started a load of towels and bathing suits. By this time it is 8:00. Which means we were at the pool for 5 hours. Yikes! The good news is that it was cloudy so I didn't have to stress about sunburns. The bad news is it was cloudy so we shivered a bit. Lots of fun was had though either way!

Cousins headed home. Bella fell asleep immediately. Ryan was not too far behind. And Felisa sat in the kitchen eating more blueberries and chanting "I'm not tired. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not." She was definitely the only one! I finally convinced her to go to bed with me where I discovered that my 4th toe on each foot (next to the pinkie toe - does that make it the ring toe?!?) was split underneath. Ouch! Guess the kids marinated me for too long in the pool today!

And that's it. One successful 1st birthday pool party for my sweet nephew. He won't remember a thing but we'll show him pictures and tell him all about it.