Eli turns SEVEN!

We have a seven year-old in the house! Eli turned seven a few weeks ago. The Sunday before Eli's birthday was the day we blessed Grace, so we had Jeremy's dad and my parents here. I asked Eli if he would like to have his cake with them and open the presents from them while they were here and he thought that was a good idea. Eli and I looked at lots of cake recipes and decided to go with a Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake. Eli loves mint chocolate chip ice cream and I thought it would be a fun way to do something different, especially since chances are we would be eating chocolate cake with mint ice cream anyway! It didn't turn out very beautiful but it tasted great! I had a few Thin Mints Girl Scout cookies left, so I crushed those for the topping (Eli doesn't like whipped cream). Yum yum!

He got to open some great presents from the grandparents - some "zoobs" from Grandma and Grandpa (building toy with gears and axels and stuff) and three Pocket Genius books from Grammy and Papa - Science, Space, and Mammals. His grandparents sure know what he loves! It was fun to have a celebration with them.

Singing to Eli...all our pictures are fuzzy, oops, we need to fix our settings.

 Connor and Anna were really interested in the zoobs too. :)

Then on his actual birthday, we had delicious German Pancakes for breakfast, at Eli's request, and then sent him off to school. I'd been asking Eli for a long time what he wanted to do for his birthday this year, but he didn't seem to have any great wishes. I threw out several ideas - a birthday party with friends, family trip to the zoo, etc. but he didn't want any of that. He just said, "Maybe we could play a game?" He sure is easy to please. (Not too often where the mom is trying to convince the kid to have a party. I should be grateful to not have to do all that work!) So we had a pretty low-key day. The three other kids and I met Eli for lunch at school and stayed to play at recess. It's always so fun to eat with Eli at school and see how he interacts with the other kids. I don't know how any of those kids manage to eat anything with all the talking going on (Eli! Eli! Eli! I kept hearing all through lunch), but it was fun! Also a funny fact - two other kids that live in our neighborhood had birthdays the same day! They sang to all of them in the cafeteria (another first grader and a kindergartner). Their moms were there too. :)

Then that evening we made individual pizzas (always a fun activity), opened his presents from us, ate the leftover cake, and played a game of course.

 Anna arranged her plate like this, I thought it was so cute.

 Yummy pizza!

It's always fun to have a special day and I love to celebrate each of our kids on their birthday. We always talk about the day they were born and how adorable they were and they all love it. :)

(Eli showing off our biggest homegrown strawberry yet! SO good!)

We sure love you Eli!