Final set of birthday pictures

I fell asleep watching Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit with the girls on Friday night, but rallied after it was over and went ahead and wrapped Julia's presents and blew up the balloons. (I figured she'd enjoy having balloons even though the party was not going to be here at the house.)

I arranged the presents on a balloon-decked chair outside the girls' bedroom door so they were the first thing Julia found when she got up at 5:30 in the morning. She, of course, wanted to open them right away (which turned out to be a good thing, because it meant that there was nothing left to wrap, blow up or deal with when we got home after the party, so I could just make some coffee and lie down until supper time).

So Julia carried each present in to my bed and opened them one at a time. They were all art supplies, including:

The biggest watercolor set I could find...

...which is even more fun when the box closes on your pajamas

A Strawberry Shortcake coloring book...

...and a pad of construction paper.
[I think she was saying something about butterflies. Either that or I was paying so much attention to the camera that I missed it when she busted out with a few bars of preschool rap.]

She also got two kinds of scissors. Ever since she learned to use scissors, she's had her own special technique (which is entirely effective, if a little odd looking). Every once in a while I show her the "grown up way" to do it, and she does seem to have had some success with it this time.

After presents, we had breakfast, got dressed and headed down to the girls' school, which was where I had asked the parents to drop off the other kids. Alex's cousin Randall is a taxi driver and helped with the transportation.

The kids did like the zoo, although several of them claimed to be tired about half way through. It's not that big a place; I think must just be a common thing with kids this age. Julia can run around and play all day, but it used to be that if you tried to actually use walking as a means of getting somewhere, she would get "tired" after about a block and a half.

I tried to go through the zoo at whatever pace the kids dictated which meant, in part, that I only ended up with one photo of an actual animal:

But I did get several of these:

I took this next one just to show how lush Costa Rica can be -- especially now, in the middle of the rainy season, and especially in a beautifully landscaped place like this zoo:


The kids liked the big leaves and frequently stopped to "take a break in the shade."


After the zoo we went to Pizza Hut, where we had some lunch, Julia opened her presents, and the kids played in the playplace until their parents came. And then we came home and I had coffee and lay on my bed watching Friends for the rest of the afternoon while the girls played with Julia's new presents.

Today I sat at the computer all day while they continued playing with Julia's new presents. We're all nursing slight colds and it's been nice to not have anything to do. The girls got along great all day and not once did they complain that they were bored. In fact, there are some videos I was supposed to return today and I had to not only offer but then remind them to watch the one they hadn't seen yet, because left to their own devices they just kept on going from one activity to another. We'll have some extra cleaning up to do tomorrow, but it's been a very peaceful day.