Benton's birthday

 Yesterday was Benton's birthday.  He's been pretty excited about it coming for about a year now.  He wanted a big party with some of his friends coming over and presents and he made a list of about 12 activities he wanted to do, complete with illustrations.

I'm pretty opposed to parties for my kids.  Mostly the presents part of them.  If there could be a party where you just got together with your friends and played and celebrated being born and didn't have to have people give you things to make you feel special, that'd be perfectly fine.  I feel the same way about baby showers. Whatever.  Yes, I know I'm weird, but still.

Anyways, Benton asked and asked enough that I finally gave in and said we could have some people come over for dinner and to eat cake and ice cream with us.  In the words of Peter, "It sure looked like a party to me."  I told people not to bring anything, but I guess I should have been a little more explicit about presents.  We had dinner and the kids played and then we had cake and ice cream and the kids played and then Benton opened presents and the kids played.  I think people had fun.  We had four families, so I think there were 14 kids and 9 adults total.  We had Hawaiian haystacks, which I thought were really, really good.  Monica came over earlier and helped the kids decorate the house.  She brought all sorts of fun things.

We made the cake the night before.  I had a the brilliant idea to make an angry birds/minion/minecraft cake.  We ended up not adding the diamond pick, though, so it turned out to be just an angry minion.  I thought it was pretty amazing.  And even more amazing is that we couldn't find many pictures of an angry bird minion on the internet.  I mostly mixed colors for the cake and Monica and Peter did most of the actual frosting.  My favorite part of birthdays is still coming up with a cake to make and making it.

 Here's Benton opening his presents.  (Just kidding, it's him after he blew out the candles on his cake.)  I tried to take him aside before he opened them to make sure he was grateful and said thank you to the people who gave him the presents.  Peter stopped me and told me he had already talked to him about it.  The result was Benton grabbing a gift, thanking the nearest person profusely and then grabbing the next one and opening it.  He kind of forgot about looking and seeing what he got.  It was pretty funny.  People helped him get everything out of the packaging afterward and he did like and appreciate everything he got, but the opening was a little funny.

 After everyone left we played glow-in-the-dark ring toss and blew up the glow-in-the-dark balloons.  the kids were crazy tired, but they had fun.  All in all I think it was a good birthday.

And can I just say that I'm so glad Benton's part of our family.  He pushes lots of buttons, but he's so kind-hearted, generous and helpful and forgiving.  The other day a guy from our ward came over for something.  I asked how his wife was doing and we talked about her for a little bit.  After he left Benton went out to the garden and picked a bunch of flowers, put them in a glass with some water and said that he wanted to take them to Sister Call (the lady we'd been talking about).  I asked if he even knew who that was and he (very indignantly) said yes, she was the music lady.  So we went and gave her the flowers.  He's always thinking of nice things to do for people.  It's pretty cool.