Sam's Birthday (New Year's Eve)...

New Year's has never been a favorite holiday of mine... and Sam has made a good reason to like the day. Sam has been counting down to his birthday since probably August. I always worry that his birthday is overshadowed by the holidays. We took Sam to see Bolt on his birthday (cute show) and then had cake and opened presents at home.











I am not one to make "cute" cakes, I'd rather have a "yummy" cake, so you wont really see any cute character cakes or themes from me... anyway, I don't know why I have a picture of the cake, because it's nothing fantastic to look at (it was yummy though). I have the candles all bundled together in one corner because I'm not a fan of eating cake that has spit all over it.








This picture is Sam's idea. We went up to Michael's brother's house for dinner and Sam said "How about you take a picture of me with my 5 fingers up, since I'm 5 now."










Michael made homemade peppermint ice cream (my favorite) and this is Kate eating it.

These weren't all the cousins that were there... a couple left early (and some weren't there), but we have a young crowd at the Gardners. There are 10 grandkids under the age of 5. The kids all played downstairs pretty well, and we even got in one adult game. We put the kids in jammies, in hopes that they would watch a movie and we could continue the games... but things dissolved and we all left before midnight. We had a fun night!