Birthday birthday birthday birthday

Here I am, reporting faithfully from Cloquet! Where it's cold. The high was like, low forties today. Expardon me? Our house is frozen, we're covered with blankets, stubbornly refusing to turn on the heat this early in the season. Plus, we're not quite ready to start poking around and trying our luck with all these radiators yet.

It's nights like this that call for a rich hot pan of brownies. You know? So I would have made them tonight, except for we're doing this new thing where we don't really eat any snacks and when we DO eat snacks, it's stuff like pistachios and low fat pretzels. It's just that time of life. You know? The time where you realize that the best thing to do is make good eating choices, however sad and drab that might be.

But sometimes life is just more manageable with a big chunk of brownie in your mouth. You know?!?

Anyways.

Birthday pictures! I have birthday pictures. There's a lot of August birthdays in our family. Sometimes we like to combine most of them together for a large conglomerate of birthday party. In this case the conglomeration celebrated the births of myself, my brother, my cousin, and my daughter. And this is how it went - my brother, cousin and I opened a few cards and then we all watched as Paisley opened what was probably an unruly amount of gifts. Unruly! But it was delightful, it really was. She opened them all ever so carefully, and sweetly enjoyed and said thank you for each one. Even when she pulled clothes out of the gift bags (clothes, typically the boring gift until you get to about....say the 13 or 14 year mark), she was thrilled and immediately started pulling them on at her feet.

I'm sure my girl will always be this polite and wonderful and gracious. Always. Forever and ever amen.

I also am including some pics of a little celebration we had just for Paisley a week later with Brian's parents. The way you can tell the difference between the two events is by the varying length of Paisley's bangs. Also by the cake pictures expressions. She certainly knew what to do with the birthday cake the second time around! Her new favorite song is the "happy birthday" one, I sing it to her when I'm trying to get her to behave or be quiet in the grocery store.

Or in Target. Or Old Navy. Or a restaurant. Or our house. Our somebody else's house.

I'm glad we had this talk.

Yes I am wearing the same shirt for both birthday parties. I'll address it. I guess it might be turning out to be my birthday party shirt, or something else to that effect. 

Until next time, sweet dreams! Many, many thanks to all you folks out there who shower lots of love on us and our girl.