the party

Here is the birthday girl. She turned three. Her new favorite color is yellow so despite my hesitation, this is the new outfit she got this year.

Here she is at the "family party" Sunday night. Yes, she is our Valentine's baby. She is in her pajamas because she was not feeling good, and of course devastaed when she couldn't wear her new dress from Grandma to church. But we gave her presents and a special dinner of jello, chips, grapes, and hot dogs (her choices, not mine) and she seemed to feel a little better.

Here is Grandma watching the birthday girl open presents over Skype. Don't you love Skype? Carlie kept trying to steal the spotlight.

And here is the real party.

Here they are jumping in the cold. We started the party at 10:00 am and the kids were so excited to play on this toddler play area.

Here they are jumping in the rain which started about 10:45 and just kept getting worse. We let them have fun and get wet until it started raining buckets, then we pulled everyone inside.

Since I had no back up plan, here we are waiting for the rain to stop. I did not document the soaking wet kids with their noses pressed against the windows begging for the rain to stop so they can play again. I should've gotten a picture of that.

Okay. . . what to do with 16 kids and no back up plan? Time for presents!

Wow, cool presents. . . now what?

Still raining. . . what else can we stall with? CAKE!

Finally, after one hour and ten minutes of strait downpour, the rain stopped. We blew up the bounce house which was now completely drenched, and Adam headed out with the shop vac to try and suck up the puddles that formed around his feet every time he took a step.

After sucking out all the water, or as much as possible, we toweled down the surface and let the kids who got permission from their parents come back out.

What a day! Seriously how often does it rain in Arizona? We ended up keeping the bounce house all weekend. Everytime it would start to get sunny we'd blow it up to dry it out. As soon as it was almost dry, the rain would start again. I'm not kidding, we tried to dry it at least five times. By Saturday afternoon we did get a good two hours of warm sunshine and a dry bounce house. We invited back everyone we could get a hold of to try and redeem our party blunder.

You may be asking yourself, 'how did they manage to get such an awesome bounce house? And for the entire weekend?' Excellent question. Remember the wedding I helped with? They just happen to own Party Central and this was their thank you present to me. I couldn't be more grateful. What a great gift!

Despite the rain, Meg had a great party. We had to open her presents and divide them up to keep the kids occupied, and we got dangerously close to a serious play doh disaster, but all in all it was so fun, and I'm sure she will never forget it.