Elijah's Birthday

So, this year, for Elijah's birthday, we went to Roundtable pizza. It was sort of a haphazard thing, not a planned out event with lots of kids. (Which was probably good, because when we got there and I said I had a reservation for a kids' birthday party, the pizza guys appeared to have no idea what I was talking about. "Uhh, sure, you can set up in the back room if you want." Note to self: do not count on Roundtable.)

But, I brought all our laundry-money quarters so that the kids (mine plus the one neighbor boy) could play the arcade games. We had cake after the pizza. This was Elijah's first year getting to pick out a store-bought cake - last year I finally finished off the "You can't read this" series with "You can (finally) read this!". And Elijah opened his presents there. At one point he declared, "This is my best birthday EVER!" I think it was mostly the arcade games.

Which just goes to show how awesome even crappy things can seem to you when you're a kid. They had a couple of those "claw" machines, and the adults kept commenting on how rigged they were, against winning. Towards the end, I gave Elijah one last quarter or two to play, and was so sorry for him when he didn't get anything out of the claw, *again*. But he turned around and said in an excited tone, something like "I almost got something that time, Mom! It was so cool!" Kids.

The downside is... I didn't bring my camera! I was really bummed about not being able to get shots of his excitement. The following PicVids came after he got home, from playing with his new toys.

He got these squirt guns from someone and then had a blast going all commando with them.

Racetrack!

Brotherly love.




I saw this and started to wonder if we were watching too much Stargate around the kids or something. But it's cute. :)



I don't think I had the camera out in time to catch the first one he did. It was awesome; he kind of did this commando-crawl along next to the table, and when Gabe came up, he held a finger up to his lips and said, very quietly, "shhh", and then they both jumped out together for a surprise attack.




Yeah, I think he did this a lot of times over again. It was THAT fun.




Of course, Julie got in on the fun, too.




Gabe kept running around yelling what sounded like "gone gone!" I eventually figured out that he was, of course, saying "gun".



What better use for plastic golf clubs that are still in the case, than as an ax?



Dad helped them set this one up.




I'm including this video too mostly because I think it's cute to hear all the kids' laughter.




Ok, so my videos were in reverse chronological order; this was actually the first one that I took after we got back. Hence the trying to ask Elijah to tell us something about being at the pizza place... an endeavor I quickly gave up on, since he was too distracted to talk to me.