birthday girl

This girl made out like a bandit for her birthday! We made her ration her present opening, for our amusement, which sounds mean, but was actually fun. She had to wait a little between gifts, so she'd play with whatever she opened instead of ignoring the pile in favor of one thing.


We started the birthday festivities by coming to school to deliver rice crispy treats and to watch her play at recess. My girl loves dress up so much! We didn't recognize her when we first walked in, she was covered from head to foot! Sheila came for her birthday and joined in the fun, allowing the kids to dress her capes and crowns.

It was fun watching her play tag with her best friend. Those kids pretty much ran full speed for an hour.

We enjoyed watching all the drama of kindergartener antics - alliances were formed and broken, sides switched and all was forgiven in moments. It was cute. And tiring. Just watching them and I needed a snack and a nap. Which is pretty much what I do all day, broken up with bursts of productivity, like making making blackberry jam or drying fruit in our fancy new dehydrator. Greg and I are very interested in food lately (more than usual) and picked up a couple of appliances we've long wanted, like a deep fryer and dehydrator. Greg made fried fish, southern style, coated in cornmeal. Our goal is to perfect my Grandma's Fish fry, fried chicken and fries. Can you tell we like our fried food? We dried bananas and strawberries and they came out jammy and sweet, exactly how I like them to be. Our next experiment will be with watermelon, which when dried, condenses into a sweet, candy-like substance. Sounds good to me.
In pregnancy news, I have two months left and look like I have one week to go. Probably because I drink sweet tea like its my job, which makes my belly gigantic and I hobble around in an unflattering shuffle, due to my pelvis widening. Oh well. Lately, we like the name Maxfield (since I like Maxfield Parrish), since Maximus is too old Roman for Greg. I was all about Marcus, but then realized it was derived from Mars, the god of war. I'm one of those gals that believe in the power of names and don't want a war-like scorpio baby. So, we are still deciding and will probably name him after we get a good look at him. But, Max does mean 'the greatest' and that's a good thing.