On her actual birthday school was cancelled (a benefit of home-school). We had pancake men for breakfast. I am reading Katelyn the little house on the praire books, and they talk about having pancake men with legs and arms. So we stepped our pancake faces up to actual men. I even dyed some of the batter so the girls could decorate their men on the griddle. They added a few details with fruit and chocolate chips when they were off the griddle. We took off for the day with a list of Kyleigh's favorite things that she wanted to do. We started at the humane society where we played with two different puppies. They were cleaning the kitten cages so we couldn't play with a kitten, but they took a mouse out and let us hold it. We then left for the shoe store. I told Kyleigh I would buy her a pair of shoes and one thing at Claires. She also brought some of her own money to spend. At the shoe store they were having a buy one, get one half off sale. She narrowed it down to two pairs of shoes, so I bought the first one and she bought the second half off. We then went to Claire's, where they were also having a sale, on shoes. It was a buy one get one free. So Kyleigh bought herself two more pairs of shoes and I bought her a cute headband. Knowing Kyleigh I can't really think of a better way to spend her birthday than buying shoes. To top off the morning we went to lunch and then for frozen yogurt at Orange Grove.
That night was the Layton summer party. They had rented out the boy scout camp in Waimea Canyon so we went camping. The next morning we came back to town for Kyleigh's soccer game and then back up to the camp for the lunch/games portion of the party. That night we went to the fair. O.K., I'm getting tired thinking about all of this.
Sunday night was Kyleigh's family birthday dinner and cake. We had Kyleigh's choice, lasagna, garlic bread, and jello. She wanted a Belle party (Beauty and the Beast). I made a Belle barbie cake. It looked pretty cute. The only catch was that the barbie was too tall for the cake. Rusty and I talked about how we could fix it. We didn't want to cut the barbies legs off because the girls were looking forward to playing with it when the party was over. We ended up pushing the barbies legs through the cardboard that the cake was sitting on and putting the whole thing on a bowl so the legs hung down into the bowl. It worked. We played two games at our little party. One was pin the chip on chip. The other was a "guess who you are." I taped a piece of paper with a beauty and the beast character on everyone's head. They had to guess who they were by asking other people questions. Katelyn got hers without any help. She asked if she had fur. She did, because she was the beast.
We had a great birthday party. We are now preparing for her baptism, which will be held September 11th.
Near the end of our trip we made our way back to Boise. The occasion was the sealing of our sweetest ever little niece. We got all of our families together in one place, and huge bonus, all of our closest friends were there, too. Jeff and Dawn flew in for about 24 hours and John and Wendi came from Utah for a long weekend. The sealing was beautiful and it was apparent that our nieces love us. We arranged to stay in the same hotel as the Giles while we were there. We made it to the park, zoo, out to dinner and ice cream, and the MK nature center. While we were at the nature center we saw a doe and her two
