8 is Great!

It really is!  Unless you don't want your kids to keep growing up anymore and then it kind of stinks because you realize your child is turning into a giant and will shortly be taller than you.

Nate woke up on his birthday dying to open his birthday presents.  Sad ofr him that he couldn't because Aunt Lola had spent the night at the hotel and we were waiting for her to open them.  He consoled himself with donuts and went off to school.

When my sister finally arrived we decided to surprise Nate by painting the stripes on his wall that I had been meaning to paint for over a month.

This was probably not our finest undertaking seeing as we ran out of painter's tape and didn't have the sticky stuff to make the laser level stick to the wall.  I also insisted on not removing any furniture from the room, so we just pushed it around the room.  All the while trying to take turns pacifying Nora who was not in the mood for a nap.  Dustin at one point made some snarky comment calling me, "Smart Lady," which Kathleen and I have now coined as out favorite term.  But not more than, "What are we?  Rockafellers?"

Somewhere in there I also managed to run to the library to pick up the book club book that I had to read in less than 3 days, take lunch to Nate at school, wrap, write and hide clues for a birthday present Scavenger hunt and we STILL managed to have all the painting done by the time he got home from school. We are magical.

I did not say we managed to get the tape off the wall before he showed up, because we didn't.

We sent Nate through the house and neighborhood looking for gifts and clues until he arrived at his very best gift -- 

a BMX bike courtesy of Grandma and Grandpa!  Please excuse the disheveled hair.  We made him work for that thing!

Nate's favorite food is a hamburger, so the 10 of us headed out to Red Robin for dinner.

Nate was most excited to have the birthday song sung to him.  He was so jealous every time they sang to another table (and apparently Red Robin is the place to go for your birthday because they sang to at least 4 other tables that night).  I tried to explain that a table of 10 takes a long time to feed and they don't sing to you until dessert.  And then we went home and passed out from paint fumes.