Six Years Old

Elise turned six on Monday. It was nice that it was on Labor Day so we could spend the whole day together. She opened her presents first thing in the morning. Watching Elise open presents is always entertaining. She gets genuinely excited about each one and has the most hilarious facial expressions. She didn’t disappoint this year.


After presents and breakfast we headed out to help Jody and Kevin move into their new house. Mostly Nate helped, the kids played, and I turned a simple shelf-assembly project into a time-warp. When we were done there, we headed to Classic Fun Center for Elise’s birthday activity. We had kicked around some other ideas, but I’m glad we ended up going there. Nate loved that I had coupons to get us in for half price; I loved that they had free Wi-Fi; and the kids loved everything about it. They had loads of fun. They spent a couple of hours playing in the Pirate’s Cove and bouncing on the giant inflatables. Abby was super brave about climbing to the top of the huge slides. It kind of freaked me out to watch her climb way up there. Nate and the three older kids played a game of laser tag, and then we spent some time at the skating rink. Emily and Elise took their new scooters and we borrowed one from Holly for Ben and Abby. Ben certainly liked it more than the girls. Emily was not a fan . . . she had a little wipeout that hurt her knee and kept complaining that the lights made her dizzy. Nate rented roller skates. Some of his moves were reminiscent of Hal's from Malcolm in the Middle. Awesome! We finished up with some arcade time. We blew through 130 tokens in no time flat and got enough tickets for each of the kids to get a few little prizes from the prize counter. Everyone was happy with their new treasures.

Disclaimer: I know that Emily’s shorts are too short. When they were getting dressed, Abby wanted Emily to match her and the only striped shorts we had were a size 5. I let her wear them without thinking through the fact that we would be spending four hours in a public place and taking 100 pictures.









Elise opted to have a birthday shake instead of a birthday cake, so Nate made a yummy grasshopper cookie shake when we got home and we just put her candles right in the top of it.


It was a full, fun day and Elise gave it two thumbs up. She did have a bit of a mid-life crisis the next day when I asked her how it felt to be six. She started crying and said that she really wanted to be five. Then she really started crying and said that she just wanted to be a baby again. At first, I thought she was just putting on a show, but she was truly upset (sobbing so hard that she couldn’t catch her breath). We had to make a list of all the things that are great about being six that she couldn’t do when she was a baby just to get her to settle down. I don’t know where that little bit of psychosis came from, but hopefully it won’t be a recurring event.