Callie's 7th Birthday

This year Callie decided that she wanted to have a birthday party with her friends to celebrate turning 7.  However, we also needed to do our traditional birthday dinner with the Chrismans, which this year included an ice cream pie because she was going to get the homemade treat treatment from Sarah at the kids' party.  Reese was just as excited as Callie about the whole evening.

Among the gifts Callie received was this purple bike helmet from her parents.  The helmet was intended to indicate that a bicycle was also part of the package, but we will need to go to the store with her to get it.  Unfortunately the stars have not yet aligned and instead of getting a bike in the fall she will be hitting the road with a new set of wheels when spring arrives.  Fortunately, she has shown a great deal of maturity in dealing with the enforced delayed gratification from her parents.

The day of the kid's party finally arrived and Sarah was ready to display her fine work.  The theme of the party was cats and dogs, and instead of presents Callie asked her friends to bring donations to the animal shelter.  The decor also included pictures made by Callie and Ella of cats and dogs and you can see that we even made dog cupcakes and puppy chow mix as giveaways.

It was a very chilly day, in fact the coldest day of the fall at that point so it was a good thing that we had a ton of activities planned. We had set a schedule that gave all the girls little time to sit around and feel the cold air. It started with a relay race that included hula hooping, a toy dog toss, and a whole lot of running. We had three teams to represent the three general origin of the friends in attendance - Team Cassidy, Team Almost Home, and Team First Presbyterian. It was great though, because all of the girls interacted and seemed to have a good time.

The next activity on the agenda was a photo scavenger hunt throughout Ecton Park.  Each team had twelve pictures that they had to identify and locate within the park and then they had to take a picture with all the members of the team in it at that location.  It was great to see the girls running all over the park, laughing and being creative.  We had to limit ourselves for this post, but this picture gives you a sense of how it all went.  And yes, Reese did the whole thing because, as usual, she sees Callie's friends as her friends too.

Before the picture taking was over we did manage to get one picture of the whole crew.  It is quite amazing how tough it can be to get sixteen or so girls to look in one direction and smile.

Callie sure has been blessed to establish such great friendships with so many different girls from all of her activities.  We can only hope that this continues to be the case in the years ahead.

For example, here to the right we have Callie with Maddie, who she has pretty much known since they were both three months old.  Then there are the Preston twins, Harper and Kennedy, who, along with Landry, are all buddies from kindergarten.  They are a fun bunch who love to be goofy and typically have a lot to say.

And then we have Callie with Vivie Ann and Murphy, who are two longstanding friends from church.  We have quite a few pictures of these three girls together over the past five years or so, and it is amazing to see their friendships continue to grow even as their social schedules get more hectic.  Our hope is that this picture will be duplicated at their high school graduations.  Time will tell.

The party was certainly a success and everyone had a great time.  And Callie was able to collect quite a sizable donation of goods for the Lexington Humane Society.  We made an outing to their office the day after the party so that we didn't have bags of dog food hanging around the house.  It felt good to donate so much but we all had to admit that the place was a little loud and it did not smell like roses.

There was time for one last picture, however, and since it was fall we were able to have the girls jump in the leaves in front of the building. Reese in particular had been wanting to jump in a pile of leaves for some time, and since John wasn't going out of his way to rake the ones in our yard, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.