Quiet Time & a Cup of Coffee: Family, friends, food, gifts....and a delicious cake!

Here is the birthday bash update, as promised!

Saturday was Afton's big, family birthday party! She had no idea that all the decorations were for her until Mike told her. She kept thinking it was for someone else! She was so excited when people started arriving, and even more happy that the gifts they had were for her.

The funny thing is that, when asked what she wanted, she kept saying "a balloon". Recently it's been her gift of choice.

I did make a point of telling those who asked to keep the gift's simple and inexpensive. Afton gets overwhelmed pretty easy when there are a lot of things to open.

Plus, she likes notepads, pencils, pens, markers, crayons, and play doh. Oh, and stickers! And Wall-E....

She loves the simple things in life!

So, shortly after people arrived we started by tossing some food on the grill. Mike was chef of the day and, after making a mad dash for more propane, the food came out terrific. We had steak tips, burgers, chicken, sausage, potato salad, regular salad, and cabbage salad. We were all stuffed!

The dessert that followed though....pardon the pun, but it took the cake.

Here is a picture of the deliciousness of the cake! It was the best ice cream cake I had ever had!

Mike took up the party planning and decided on a Carvel ice cream cake. Those are always a winner! However, I get a call the next day and he asked me to pick up the following ingredients:

3 boxes of ice cream sandwiches
2 containers of Cool Whip
2 jars of fudge sauce

Sounds simple enough and it doesn't even come close to sounding as delicious as it tasted. I took one bite and it was like a taste of heaven. I wasn't alone because all you heard was, "mmmm" "oh, yum" "this is so good" After that I think it was the quietest it had been all day because everyone's mouth was full of homemade ice cream cake!

Afton enjoyed opening her gifts and even remembered to thank everyone at the end! She was so sweet...

Auntie Carrie gave her moon sand, and that made the kids day! Miya, Afton and Caleb loved playing with it.

After the food and gifts we just sat and hung out for a while chatting and laughing. Friends of ours were able to make it and it had been over 7 months since we had last seen them. They have a 9 1/2 month old son, Levi, who is getting so big! It was great catching up.

Saturday was a great start to a good weekend!

Sunday we went to church. The message was about forgiveness and it was awesome. I may share some really good points in another post.

After church we came home, ate lunch and the kids and parents had quiet time for a little bit. I ran to to the mall to pick up two things that I thought would be good "little" gifts for Christmas.

Later on we brought Miya back and had pizza for dinner. There is a little pizza shop that makes the most amazing pizza. It's called the chicken caeser pizza....yum, yum yummy!!!! So delicious...

On the way home we passed by the small, local airport and there were a good amount of private jets and helicopters on the airfield. So, we stopped to watch a few of them take off. The kids were so excited they were jumping up and down and yelling, "Yay, yay!". I wish I had had my camera ready to take pictures or a video because they were so funny!

We had a great weekend filled with fun, family, friends, food, cake, presents, laughter, airplanes, dirt and a whole bunch of other stuff I can't think of!