For Poppy

We hope you had as much fun celebrating your birthday as we did!!!

My kids have been dying for July to come since, well, last July. That's when Parker, Drew and Claire's birthdays all are. That's one heck of a lot of fun to look forward to. Andrew has been asking me if we can eat cake for weeks. So when he asked the other day, I told him it would soon be Poppy's birthday and we could eat cake then. See, I knew from experience that he wouldn't mind sharing his birthday with some kids as cute as these. I recall a certain little girl convincing him once upon a time that since the new Tim McGraw cassette tape was coming out that day, (and some other country artist as well....can't remember now) that she should really be getting a birthday present that day as well. Would you believe it worked? Of course, now that I have kids of my own I can see how the charm is irresistible sometimes.

So celebrate we did! While we did have a great time today, you should know Poppy that we missed you OH SO MUCH!! I think I had the kids a bit confused celebrating without you and they were half convinced that they would see your truck driving up at any moment. That would have been the only way to top the day.

At the risk of ruining any surprises, I'm going to let you in on what we did. First we started by making you a present. Yeah, we're going to be late getting it to you but what else is new? I thought we'd be able to get these in the mail this afternoon, but as you can see......it involves paint. And I failed to realize that these kids would use enough paint that only heaven knows when they'll be dry enough to mail. Let's just say they were enthusiastic.

And again, ruining surprise here, (but don't tell Parker!) I had planned to put pictures of them in these frames, but they had a better idea! They loved painting so much they decided to also paint you a picture to put in the frame. I won't show the final product, but I will say that by this point they were having so much fun mixing colors together that when I asked Parker what his picture was, the best description he could think of was "a big fat allergy." If anyone's going to love it, I know you will Popster!

And then we had cake. What's a birthday without chocolate cake? Not much of one at this house. And we all know I don't need much of an excuse to have chocolate cake.

It was tasty.

Really tasty.

Love you tons Poppy! Hope you had a great day!